A EU training program to prime fellow firefighters: ‘Many countries have no idea about Mediterranean fires’

“There may be people trapped by the fire!” shouts the fire chief while air tankers fly over a protected region of Nea Makri in Greece. The idea is to move carefully and quickly through the pine forest, deploy the hoses and attend to an injured colleague. Several brigade members soak the area while others transport the injured person on a stretcher. Colonel Lieutenant Vasileios Bikas, the head of the Greek fire service, approaches. “He’s fine,” he says. “He just needs a beer.” Laughter. This is the end of a drill in which Romanian firefighters practiced reacting to fires like those that hit southern Europe every summer.

The EU’s European Civil Protection Mechanism is an entity that coordinates the aid and resources of member countries and other states in the face of emergencies and disasters. Its managers organize training programs so that the personnel exchanged between countries in crisis are adequately prepared. Greece and Spain often receive this support from countries less accustomed to wildfires, which are now seeing how climate change is driving the flames northwards.

The Nea Makri headquarters has become home to Romanian, Moldovan, French and Czech firefighters during the summer. This is where they train, sleep, eat, study and engage in field work if necessary. There are basic lessons, such as locating escape points — in this case the beach of Schinias — or parking the fire trucks in the direction of the road to escape if things get complicated.

“Lives comes first!” says Bikas, who explains that in peak fire season his days are long. “Often we are out more than 24 hours straight; unfortunately, in summer we have no family,” he adds. At the end of July, three firefighters died while working in the island of Crete and Greece’s mainland Peloponnese region; in August, two people died in Salamis in Cyprus. Bikas says that his 16 years as an international basketball referee, especially on badly maintained courts, come in useful now: “You have to expect the unexpected,” he says.

The leader of the Romanian group, Ionut Cobziuc, says that this training “is a great opportunity to increase our knowledge and experience.” Cobziuc talks about temperatures: it is extremely hot, much hotter than back home, and he appreciates how it toughens him up.

The Nea Makri facilities were set up by the Greek government in 2021 in response to the tragic fires of 2018 in Attica, the southern region of the country that includes Athens, and which claimed 102 victims. Since then, the “beast” has been going rogue: in 2024, there was another large fire very close to the facilities that swept the nearby hills clean of trees. The government updated the system’s response while also creating the Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection to manage the challenge.

Bikas opens up the equipment room. These facilities have had to be adapted, because each country had a different style of fire hose. Now they use similar ones. Today is a quiet day: medium level, three out of five. Bikas’ colleagues monitor the area and prepare reports. One wall features a framed map of the country showing the minimum risk on August 19. It’s something of a miracle. Usually the map is covered with yellow, orange and red dots. And not only in summer; fires are common now in spring and autumn as well.

“The Czechs said they had never seen anything like this, the head of the Moldovans said he had only seen fires like this in movies. They are all firefighters, but they had no idea about Mediterranean fires,” says Bikas, who is critical of climate change denialism. “It’s a fact. Summers are hotter, this is a new era of megafires,” he says.

The evidence stacked up this summer. France suffered the largest fire on record, covering 42,000 hectares, well above the previous record which was 12,000 after World War II. Norway has also burned; the Netherlands suffered wildfires in May; and, in California, wildfires gripped the state in January. Something is changing and the countries that used to send firefighters to Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece are perceiving how danger is now knocking on their own doors.

Bikas rejects the term “natural disasters.” The risk is natural, but the “disaster” depends on how humans relate to nature – for example, the risk is exacerbated by the existence of houses in the middle of a pine forest, thereby multiplying the potential for fires; or in ravines, which become traps for floods such as those in Spain’s Valencia region in 2024.

The European Civil Protection Mechanism has been gaining members since its creation in 2001. Since then, more than 880 missions have been carried out – 64 in 2025 in Spain, which faced a serious wave of fires, replicated this July. So far in 2026, a total of 295,720 hectares have burned in Spain, which is 45.6% of the total of 647,375 affected in the entire EU, according to the Copernicus system.

The European Civil Protection Mechanism also helps countries that are not yet part of the EU; it is, for example, now active in Serbia, which has been in the process of joining the EU since 2009 and has been experiencing serious wildfires. Colonel Zisoula Ntasiou, head of the sensitive area of Attica and vice-president of the International Association of Fire and Rescue Services (CTIF), explains that “it is very important to teach firefighters from other countries” how they themselves function. “They end up grateful and impressed,” he says. Ntasiou, who is also an expert in forest management and the environment, adds that “we have lost the connection with nature, you cannot protect what you do not take care of, and the forest is packed with tinder.”

Ntasiou also warns that the fires that Mediterranean Europe has been suffering for years have now extended north. And there is no time to lose: “No country alone can fight the challenge of increasing heat waves and extreme heat. It is obvious that climate change is here and cooperation is needed,” he says.

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