El Plan de Emergencia por Incendios Forestales, better known as Plan Infoca, is now operative at its maximum state, and will remain so until the 15th of October.

If somebody is caught making a fire in the countryside it’s off with his pods!

In our province the anti-forest-fire agency (Infoca) counts on 683 personnel, with everybody from pilots to flame stompers; the infantry battling the flames on the ground. They have 200 vehicles: water bowsers fire trucks large and small and personnel transport, as well as six aircraft.

Financing this campaign is a budget of nearly 24-million euros, of which 12.1m go on fire extinction and 11.6m on fire prevention. Needless to say, the best form of fighting fires is through preventing them, which is why almost half of the budget goes on eliminating vegetation that serves as combustion material, as well as cutting and maintaining firebreaks.

We’ve got four operational bases from which the aircraft fly and where the vehicles are parked: Los Tablones near Órgiva, La Resinera near Jayena, Puerto Lobo-Viznar near Granada and Moralillos de Jérez del Marquesado in the north of the province.

But even with all this, 2018 is going to be much trickier than normal owing to the highest, recorded, spring rainfall since records began in 1940. The mountains still look green, but all this rain has generated a much greater growth in vegetation which is going to become tinder dry when the summer heats up.

(News: Granada, Andalucia)