One of the new challenges facing the Tenerife forest fire, after two months, is the loss of soil in the affected areas due to the possible intensity of the rainfall expected on the island.
On this Tuesday morning, José María Sánchez, fire extinguishing director, assured that “the worst that can happen is that a subtropical front approaches and causes severe damage”, a fact that would affect the affected areas to a greater extent. from the southern area, where the fire has had greater intensity.
These areas have cold soil, but there is no vegetation to protect them because there is no pine needles and, in addition, they consist of high slopes. In the northern part, however, the soil is also unstructured, without organic matter, and will require a compaction and stabilization project in the event of heavy rains.
Human intervention in these types of processes is key against the loss of surfaces that are crucial for ecosystems as we know them.
For Jaime Coello, director of the Telesforo Bravo-Juan Coello Foundationthe loss of soil after forest fires is something very serious that must be avoided at all costs.
“When a forest fire occurs, the soil is a layer that suffers a lot and goes from being, at times, permeable and allowing water to penetrate, to a completely closed and impermeable layer that causes water to circulate over it, taking its passing surface strata.” Coello states that this happens because “the roots that were there are no longer fixed and because many elements that were previously there are no longer there.”
The possibility of the soil being “lost on the coast” is high, as occurred in the last forest fire in the Garajonay National Park in 2012: “We are talking about many hundreds of years in which this soil has been forming, lost in very Little time”.
In some places, elements are placed to hold the surface, which can be natural or artificial, which allow the soil or the small layer that remains not to wash away with the rain because otherwise two things can happen, as Coello explains: “That soil can cause accumulation with other materials and generate floods if the rain is strong enough; or that soil ends up being lost to the sea.”
Everything will depend, ultimately, on the impact of the rainfall announced for these days and its characteristics, whether it is torrential rain that on soil that has lost its absorption capacity can have a “devastating” effect.
