Wild Fires

This is definitley a country of extremes. Last rainy season (while we were in Cochabamba training) I was watching horrible scenes of flooding throughout the Santa Cruz, Beni and Pando regions...people being rescued from flooded villages, thousands of floating cow carcasses. Now there are a ton of wildfires burning in the same areas. Though the worst seem to be in the nearby Chaco. There is a volunteer in Villamontes right now helping in the fire fighting effort in over 100 degree heat! (Cha Chi your my hero!) Most of the fires have been started by people burning land to clear for their crops. A practice that is still very alive and well in Bolivia. The sky has been really hazy for the past couple of weeks sending many people to the hospitals with respiratory infections and forcing the closuer of many airports. I even heard the airport in La Paz was shut down for a couple of days. They are predicting that the fires will continue for the next month and a half!! I certainly hope they can get the situation under control a little sooner. I was talking to my friend about the fires saying ¨I can´t imagine how Bolivian firefighters could get control of a situation this bad¨. And she jokingly said ¨Yeah don´t you need hoses to put out f¡res?¨ While her comment was kind of funny...she´s also has a point. And becuase of this fire fighters from Paraguay, Peru and Argentina have already been sent in to help.

Here´s an article I found to give you a better idea-

Some 12,000 forest fires are raging in Bolivia, forcing the closure of all but the biggest airports and threatening the country's natural gas fields and fuel pipelines, authorities said Wednesday. The head of Bolivia's armed forces, Gen. Wilfredo Vargas, said that the army "is on emergency (alert)" to help extinguish the fires. The burning of forest is an ancient - though now illegal - practice at this time of year to clear more land on which to plant crops.

The director of Civil Aviation, Javier Garcia, confirmed Wednesday at a press conference that 30 of the country's 37 airports are closed due to the density of smoke from the fires. The press reported the danger posed by the fires in areas traversed by gas and fuel pipelines, like the Bolivian Chaco region, where more than 7,000 hectares (17,500 acres) have already been burned. The mayor of the southern town of Villamontes, Ruban Vaca, said that state energy company YPFB should be concerned because the fire is about to arrive at several gas wells. The director of land management, Cliver Rocha, said that the courts should "send to jail" anyone who burns their land to expand their cultivation area because they are putting at risk the health of the public as well as the environment. Meanwhile, President Evo Morales met with his Cabinet to analyze the situation and the emergency measures being taken to deal with the fires.