Scotland is set to increase its defences against wildfires as a heatwave starts deadly blazes across southern Europe.
At least eight people have been killed in fires that have torn for six days through southern Turkey, ravaging coastal resorts and forcing tourists to flee in the country’s worst fire crisis in a decade. Firefighters are also trying to contain wildfires in parts of Greece, Spain and Italy, in which there were more than 1,500 flare-ups on Sunday.
While Scotland has not experienced the same level of destruction, senior firefighters believe that natural disasters caused by global warming present a threat in the UK.
The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service is more than doubling the number of stations with firefighters specially trained and equipped to tackle blazes in forests, moors, fields and bogs.
Bruce Farquharson, an area commander, told The Herald: “We are all experiencing the same issues, just in different ways. The impact of climate change is being felt in the northern hemisphere fairly similarly. It is just a question of scale.
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“The [service] is in the midst of introducing its new wildfire strategy, which includes creating a number of different tiers of stations where we have specialist responder stations, of which there will be ten core and 15 support stations.
“That is 25 stations trained and equipped in a new way to deal with a wildfire. We have currently got about ten stations that have some sort of wildfire tackling ability.”
In April this year, which was one of the driest on record, hundreds of firefighters tackled serious wildfires in the UK after a prolonged dry spell led to grass and gorse blazes. Large fires were reported in Cornwall, Dorset, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, the Lake District, north Wales and Orkney.
In 2019 there were fires in both Moray and Caithness that scorched about 29,000 acres (120 sq km).
Experts are especially concerned about peat fires, which can require digging trenches down to bedrock to stop fires spreading.
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“With a fire that is in a bush or a tree you can see it,” Farquharson said. “With a fire in peat, it is underground, it is unseen. And we can have the phenomenon when the fire appears to be extinguished but it is still smouldering away. And it will channel away underground and hit something more combustible, such as a tree root.
“Essentially, fighting such fires involves getting bulldozers in to scrape back the peat and create a break between the peat and other fuel. It is as barbaric as that.”
As part of the new strategy, farmers, foresters, gamekeepers and crofters will receive training to assist fire crews.
Farquharson said: “In other parts of the world, they see fires started by weather. We have never seen that in Scotland yet.
“But climate change is doing all sorts of funny things so the fact we have not seen it yet does not mean we won’t see it at some point.”
