Casavieja is no longer orange and black, if anything, somewhat gray. The mind takes time to relocate upon entering this municipality in Ávila with 1,500 inhabitants, where on Saturday the fire rushed down from the mountains and the gale lifted the smoke and darkened the skies. This Tuesday there is a faint whitish page from the flying ash, which will take days or unexpected rains to disappear, and the residents estimate immense damage to the forest and the homes in the upper area.
The fire prowled but did not bite a park where there is a small lake, relatively green grass, some wooden benches shaped like animals, a carved wood like a howling wolf, and a fox dressed as a firefighter. Next to it, a sculpture in memory of the forest firefighters with special remembrance of Javier Tirado, a brigadier who died in 2005 when the flames threatened the town. “It was the appetizer of what awaited us,” is heard in a bar where sorrows are drowned and the spirits of those who denounce abandonment before the drama burn.
The story has repeated, multiplied. On August 5, 2005, three fire spots merged in one of the rocky gorges visible from the town and a burning tongue descended towards the core. A crew of firefighters was ascending to stop it when a rock detached from the burned ground and crushed Javier Tirado, a young Andalusian part of the La Iglesuela brigade. A few days earlier, 11 firefighters died in Guadalajara in the greatest tragedy in the sector in the history of Spain. Vicente Rodríguez, 58 years old, sighs next to the park created in honor of the fallen, with seats and tables shaped like turtles. The nearby and resilient holm oaks watch how the sensitive pines opposite have blackened and still smoke, defeated. The man, whose haystack has been burned, fondly remembers the sculptor who created the tribute, Javier Díaz, and another firefighter who collaborated on the ensemble and has also suffered this summer: Habidis, whose house has burned down. Impossible to locate him, a constant worker, deployed through the forest to contain regrowth.
One can still sense some gray column warning that the battle is not over yet, especially today as the heat presses fiercely. A firefighter who made a documentary about those brigades and who knew the story of Tirado and Habidis gets emotional upon learning that the fire has returned to the place: “A part of mine has also burned, I haven’t stopped crying these days, I couldn’t believe it.” At the feet of the immortalized Tirado, a motto: “The forest firefighter at the service of nature.”
The road allows access to where firefighters retreated on Saturday, unable to contain an overflowing fire spot that galloped without possible restraint. The asphalt leads to a devastated campsite, the umpteenth in the natural surroundings of the entire province that have suffered the flames and have been melted, like in a black and white photograph, a dead futuristic nature. The aluminum of a kart reduced to a small metallic skeleton has formed silver tongues on the brown and black ground, with ashes rising with the footsteps. Amorphous appliances mix with melted glass, a lightning rod has fallen from a disappeared roof and waits its turn to be removed. The gigantic pines have succumbed and crushed prefabricated houses and block the alleys with their black bark wood.
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The bum, bum, bum heard on Friday amid the roar of the beast were not doors slammed by the wind, but butane canisters exploding. What heat must have been reached for these, which withstand enormous temperatures, to burst. The electricity cables have also melted so the Civil Protection team that comes to review the losses moves cautiously, just in case. A sign urging not to barbecue and to protect the landscape also melted, as did the pipes from which water flows like a fountain that will be lost over the ash blanket. Both these volunteers and the young people chatting on a terrace agree in their disaffection towards the firefighting operation: yes, on Saturday there were many trucks and hoses and uniforms and fire beaters and such, but on Friday they missed official firefighters “and a couple of helicopter passes would have stopped it.”
There is a man who has moved away from the group observing the devastation of the campsite and walks slowly, assessing damage, oblivious to the rest. Rolando Rollán, 42 years old, bends down and picks up from the ground a scorched bell, with a decorative rooster on top, that rings when shaken. The man from Ávila gets emotional. It is his brother’s plot, where so many birthdays and picnics have been celebrated. Saturday was the funeral of that mobile home, 12 square meters, with kitchen and gazebo. The fire, half extinguished, still mocks: there are stumps that keep small flames flickering in their dazzling orange. The companions comment, with an optimism that perhaps deep down they do not fully believe, that “it could have been worse.”
There are parts of the campsite that resisted the onslaught in the pool area, where now only splashes of branches and sparks shot by the fire splash. The Civil Protection group walks through the devastated sector and a boy points to one of those broken canisters: “What a big crack it has!” An adult, wary, urges him to move away: “Hugo, don’t you dare touch the canister. You trust the devil…” Another whispers, speaking to nothing, recalling what seemed like projectiles and was butane overheating: “I sleep with that sound…”
