Yesterday was one of those unfortunate coincidences. After raising the alert from the Government of the Canary Islands for irrigation at 2:00 p.m. yesterday that the high temperatures suffered by many areas of the Archipelago degenerated into fires on islands such as those in this province of Tenerife and Gran Canaria, a dangerous attempt that led on fire right on the border between the municipalities of La Laguna and El Rosario. It was on the Camino de Guillén, within the lagoon neighborhood of El Ortigal and, although in the end it did not cross into the neighboring municipality, its danger was evident given its proximity to wooded areas, with all that this entails.
However, and far from what may be mistakenly assumed, said deactivation of the alert does not mean that the mountain is left without the surveillance due to this respect, since a pre-alert situation for the means of extinction does remain in force. This implies that they maintain a sufficient response capacity to deal with what happened yesterday on the aforementioned Camino de Guillén, and the best proof of this is that such a complicated fire was fought from the beginning with such an arsenal of emergency personnel, among which it is fair to highlight both the aerial means (the formidable carousel of bambis – receptacles with water – that successively unloaded up to three helicopters over the area when not even two hours had passed since the initial alert) and the hard-working firefighters of the Forestry Brigades of the Cabildo together with those of the Insular Consortium, all supported by State, regional and local security forces and bodies that, as a whole, managed to stabilize the fire before nightfall. All this, with the peace of mind that the fire did not manage to finally cross the key barrier that meant reaching the municipality of El Rosario, where in any case the families living in the vicinity were evacuated preventively and traffic was interrupted on a highway .
In addition, and also preventively, the forestry brigades of La Gomera were alerted where, to make matters worse, in the middle of the afternoon it was declared a conatus in another delicate point from the geographical perspective for what concerns us, such as the peaks near Chipude. There, the distribution of the members of the fire-fighting devices of the Cabildo de la Isla Colombina proved to be equally successful, as evidenced by the fact that their proximity to the loofah in which the flames lit facilitated their prompt neutralization. Of course, summer is not only not over, but in the Canary Islands there are already two heat waves. Caution.
