Sebastian Pertl almost got it himself. The Wast, as everyone here calls him, remembers well how they sat on his pasture up on the Geigelstein on a Saturday and someone said there was a fire. They would have laughed, that would be done soon. Then on Monday the alarm, forest fire on the Geigelstein, and Pertl right in the middle as the operations manager of the mountain rescue service and as the owner of the alp. It would not have been amiss, and the control center in Rosenheim would have offered the full program: large-scale operation for the fire brigades all around, disaster alarm, extinguishing tanks and helicopters from half of Bavaria and from nearby Austria, just like five years ago only ten kilometers further on the Schwarzenberg near Kiefersfelden.
Nobody here has anything against helicopters and large-scale operations, quite the opposite: If it has to be, then it has to be – see Schwarzenberg, where in 2018 hundreds of emergency services and nine helicopters fought the forest fire for four days after lightning struck a tree on a steep slope. For such cases, the Free State recently took over the first two of eight new, heavier police helicopters, which can also carry more extinguishing water. In two years, all eight should be put into service, with thermal imaging cameras and all the trimmings, for a total of 145 million euros. But at the same time, forest fires will become more frequent in Bavaria’s mountains, forest fire expert Lindon Pronto leaves no doubt about that. And then it has to be done quickly.
Pronto, who was born in California 34 years ago, spent seven years there as a firefighter in burning forests for the forest authority and later spent a long time as a consultant halfway around the world, now works for the “European Forest Institute” (efi). There he organizes the international exchange of knowledge about forest fires in a project funded by the federal government and trains emergency services. And the very first emergency services in the mountains are often the alpine farmers or hut keepers.
A few days ago, Sebastian Pertl and his colleagues were back at the Geigelstein to waste, to cut back bushes and mountain pines so that their alpine pastures don’t overgrow. They burned the branches up there, this time under the guidance of Lindon Pronto. They made sure not to ignite the fire over rootstocks, and they dug small ditches around the fireplaces with the hoe so that nothing rolls down the slope and so that the fire does not spread underground like it did on Pertls Alm. In the meantime, Pronto has distributed half a dozen such extinguishing sets to the owners of particularly remote mountain pastures here in the Priental.
A few days ago, the farmers cut back mountain pines up on the Geigelstein so that their alpine pastures don’t slowly grow over. After this so-called shaving, the branches are burned – immediately an opportunity to practice with the backpack sprayer.
(Photo: Lindon Pronto (oh))
“We’ve forgotten how to handle fire,” says Pronto down in the valley. Advancing climate change, heat waves, droughts lasting weeks, extreme weather conditions – all of this increases the risk of forest fires, and in the Alpine region in particular, around twice as many lightning strikes are now being registered as 40 years ago. At the same time, the topic for Pronto also has cultural aspects. In Germany, for example, it is practically unthinkable to simply let a fire burn, even if it is to be expected that it will cause hardly any damage and will eventually go out by itself.
Pronto explains his equipment and concepts of the Sachranger fire brigade, which is also his own village fire brigade, because he has been living in his grandmother’s house in a nearby hamlet for several years. He brought Jörg Häusler with him to the fire station, who worked for various professional fire brigades for 25 years and is now the full-time civil protection officer for the Bavarian mountain rescue service. Häusler explains the contribution that mountain rescue services can make to forest fires, and not just in the mountains.
According to Häusler, you can use all-terrain vehicles to bring people and material to the site, or simply ensure that food is provided during an operation and the rescue service can be called in case of an emergency. Escape routes secured with ropes can be created and, above all, the individual firefighters can be secured in steep terrain with fire-resistant ropes. The material for this is bundled in two special trailers for emergencies, one in Murnau and one in Altötting. Extinguishing, however, remains the sole task of the fire brigade, emphasizes Häusler.
Forest fire expert Lindon Pronto, alpine farmer and mountain rescue service member Sebastian Pertl and firefighter Thomas Parigger (from left) demonstrate on the outskirts of Sachrang how to quickly fight a small fire in the mountains.
(Photo: Matthias Köpf)
The reason for such assurances are old jealousies between the rescue organizations. Some association representatives struggled and struggled for money and a hearing with the responsible authorities and ministries, where there are also rivalries between the respective departments. Lindon Pronto and Jörg Häusler are all the more pleased that not only Commander Stefan Singhartinger and other local firefighters have come to Sachrang, but also the Rosenheim district fire officer Richard Wardrobe as the region’s top firefighter and some district fire chiefs and inspectors.
Here in Rosenheim there is no problem anyway. In order to reduce the constant false alarms, the district set up an online portal a while ago, which can be used to register Dax fires like the one after Schwandern on the Geigelstein. The fire brigade and mountain rescue team work hand in hand, not only at the base, as is often the case elsewhere. But he has also experienced that some fire departments simply didn’t want to talk to him as a mountain rescue worker, says Häusler. In any case, the European Forest Institute chose the Chiemgau as a demonstration region for fighting forest fires in the mountains, says Lindon Pronto.