Many people from Brabant travel to the sunny south this month. This is also the case with firefighter Rini Pijnen from Ossendrecht. But for him it is certainly not a vacation: he will go for twelve hours a day between the heel axes, chainsaws, hot fires and fireplace aircraft for two weeks. He helps his colleagues in Spain to fight the fierce forest fires in their country. And extra special is that he carries out his work with a prosthetic leg. He lost his left leg in an accident.
“And those fires are raging in the Galicia region, in the northwest of Spain,” Rini says on the phone on Tuesday, waiting for his flight to Ourense at Schiphol. There is the barracks where he will spend in the coming weeks.
It is not entirely coincidental that Rini is going to Spain. “I specialize in natural fires. Such a specialized team will be ‘hand crew“called and that means that you can extinguish with little water,” explains Rini. His corps is one of the seven forces with the specialty in Brabant.
Hand crew
These firefighters are specially trained and trained for natural fire fighting. They often work under difficult circumstances and in difficult areas that are difficult to access, where normal fire engines cannot come.
How do you proceed? “We remove the vegetation so that the fire cannot spread any further. Then the Spanish colleagues come with fireplaces to extinguish the places where there is still a fire.”
“So it’s not a holiday trip.”
What makes the work of Rini and the other hand crew firefighters even more difficult is that they cannot get with extinguishing vehicles in the places where the fire is raging. “We are dropped by a car and then we walk 15 kilometers from that location to the fire. We walk with tools,” says Rini. “So it’s not a holiday trip.”
When they are at the destination, they work in a structured way. “We have special tools to remove the vegetation, either bush and grass crop so that the fire cannot spread. Two men with a chainsaw and forest mower are at the forefront to remove the big stuff. Behind it with a heel ax around the ground, Rini continues. “And then someone with a megahark, a kind of kick with teeth to pull vegetation away.”
“We make days from ten to twelve hours. With a temperature of 35 degrees.”
Before everything, your condition must be good. “We make days from ten to twelve hours. That is quite tough with a temperature of 35 degrees. We protect ourselves by drinking well and working hard, but moderately hard. Not that you have already extinguished after the first hours.”
“To be able to work with that heat, we have also received a special suit. It is a bit lighter than a normal fire pack and therefore moves easier and regulates the heat better.”
What makes the journey and the spicy work extra special is that Rini is the only one of his colleagues with a prosthesis. That is an artificial tool that replaces a missing body part. Rini had just finished his training as a firefighter when he lost his left leg in an accident. That then meant the end of his career as a part -time firefighter. Until he was asked in 2018 to come back and came through the inspection brilliantly.
Rini sets off with healthy tension on Tuesday. “I had to get out a few times in the Netherlands as a hand crew, but I have never experienced something like this before. It is on a large scale so that is always exciting.”
If the journey goes well, Rini and the others arrive in northern Spain at nine in the evening.
