The Valdeorras region is a valley covered with smoke, which has been becoming dense with the passing of the days. The flames that began on Wednesday in Larouco went down and raised slopes, surrounded villages and crossed roads and even a reservoir. The official fact of the Xunta is that 2,000 hectares have burned, there have been confinements in several nuclei of Petín and Rúa and five injured people came by their own foot to the Hospital of O Barco de Valdeorras. But the story counts much more when it is the neighbors who talk about the three nights that already have just sleeping with improvised tools to the flames. And they assume that the “hell”, as Yoli Díaz describes, has not ended for them.
Díaz appears in the middle of this Saturday going down back in his car along a dirt track. He has loaded a cube with water and travels a path to turn off the flames that are revived. If they cross it, he says, his village, Carballal (Petín), is convicted. He looks especially in two pines that remain green above the last houses. Above, he says, there is another neighbor watching.
He sits next to the road to rest and explain what he has seen since Wednesday. He points out above, where the core of O Seixo must be, among the smoke. When the flames went there, he says, “there was no one.” It refers to the fact that the neighbors were alone, as in Carballal, where he states that the professional fire device, overflowed with the Ourense, appeared when the fire was next to the houses. A helicopter made downloads and two regional firefighters arrived with hoses and connected them to the water mouths. The neighbors continue to throw.
Yoli Díaz says that there are many nuclei in which the neighbors have been surrounded by the flames. In Santa María, houses burned and nine people ended up taking refuge in a COVA “A winery. From there they called for help and managed to leave. They say it was hard for them to breathe and feared to die. They have already returned to the village and, after the danger, they explain in shifts how it happened. The fire locked them in the blink of an eye, they say. He burned everything around the houses with a speed that they claim not to have seen before. The speed with which the flames advance is an element that appears in each conversation where the earth has been burned.
The fire of Santa María took some of the houses, abandoned or uninhabited, but also planted on one of the walls of the house of a family that had to go out with cubes to prevent it from spreading. “And that we went in the morning to Mass,” Ironizes one of the women of the village, who, with the name of Santa María, had well marked in the Catholic calendar on August 15. He says that shortly after the flames were at the gates of the town.
“We are already alive thank you”
Another neighbor recounts that her house has suffered some damage, just like the tractor and a packer. And that saved by the hair one of the dogs: “My husband took it out and the roof fell.” The animal now walks coughing between the stones of the collapsed wall of one of the homes that burned. “We are already alive, thank you,” she repeats. They all protest because they saw themselves: “No one came here until the danger had already passed.”
“The villages are mousetracks,” says Yoli Díaz, the neighbor of Carballal, to which the three nights that have barely slept have made him reduce expectations. He no longer asks for a more extensive professional device, but is given to the Batefuegos and Mouths of Water with hoses so that the neighbors can defend themselves, what they are actually already doing in numerous villages.
Other municipalities expect with concern
Díaz repeats that it was the neighbors who were organized and using the means they could find, from a truck of the City Council to batches made with branches. At some point he has to think to know what happened what he is telling. For her, since Wednesday, everything seems the same day full of fires that multiply. He has seen photographs that others have taken him out and says he does not know how he got into where he got into. After a few minutes, he takes up his work of detecting any flame that has been revived above Carballal, but it does not take even half an hour to communicate that he is going to Fontei, in the neighboring municipality of A Rúa, because they need help urgently.
The flames of this fire forced to evict a residence of elders in A Rúa, caused a toxic cloud by burning a landfill and threatened and continues to threaten populated nuclei, in which the neighbors organize themselves with what they have at hand. Now, the concern advances to Vilamartín and O Barco, where the flames run. Also in Rubiá, which is next and is the last municipality of Galicia before entering the Bierzo, they already look at the mountain trying to distinguish if the fire has arrived.
