## 2 Fireighting State  
This section analyzes the current state of firefighting. For this purpose, it describes current operations of fire prevention, surveillance, and extinguishing, collects relevant statistics to identify main problems, and presents the opinions of professionals through two surveys. Note that most of the information presented in this section is from Spain, but can be generalized to at least European and Mediterranean countries. In 2019, 10,883 fires burned 83,963 ha in Spain: 7290 of these fires affected less than 1 ha, whereas 3593 affected more than 1 ha [5]. As reported, these figures were similar to the previous years, having an average of 12,182 fires and 99,082 ha per year between 2009 and 2018. In other words, every year, 0.356% of the forest surface of Spain suffers the consequences of fires. Most of these fires occur in spring and summer, especially in March, July, August and September, whereas the worse consequences occur in July and August when more surface burns than the rest of the year [6]. In the case of summer, this behavior can be explained by the high temperatures, which favor the appearance of fires and their spread throughout the territory. In the case of March, most of these fires occur in the north-west of the country and are caused by an accidental, negligent, or intentional use of fire. However, firefighting is performed throughout the year, since it involves not only extinguishing fires but also preventing them. Fire prevention involves a set of activities that seek to reduce the probability of fire occurrence, as well as to limit their effects if they occur [7]. More than half of forest fires in Spain between 2006 and 2015 were caused intentionally, whereas 28% were caused by accidents or negligent behaviors, 7% had natural origins, and 12% still have unknown causes. Therefore, there are two main groups of activities: prevention on causes and prevention on combustibles. The first category groups those activities that seek to reduce the risks and usually present a social character, such as the awareness campaigns to avoid the use of fire in the primary sector and negligent behaviors in natural environments. The second one covers the actions performed on land uses and vegetation distribution, which seek to generate discontinuities to prevent the expansion of potential fires. Fire surveillance involves the activities performed to detect fires as early as possible. The damages caused by forest fires highly depend on detection and response times. The information of Spain in 2019 is clear: the average burned surface when response time was shorter than 1 h was 7.10 ha, whereas the one when response time was longer than 1 h was 30.66 ha [5]. For this reason, minimizing detection and response times is key for firefighting. Currently, detection times are addressed with a watchmen network distributed throughout the land and, to a lesser extent, ground and aerial mobile surveillance. In Spain, 60% of fires are detected thanks to citizen collaboration, 27% by static watchmen, 1.6% by mobile watchmen, and 0.5% by aerial means [6]. Meanwhile, response times are addressed by the effective coordination of the teams and the use of helicopters to deploy firefighters in the affected area. Fire extinguishing involves not only the actions performed to put out the flames but also some activities that support these actions, such as creating firewalls, routes for entry and exit of vehicles, runways, helicports, etc. In Spain between 2006 and 2015, these activities involved the participation of humans (100% of fires), ground vehicles and machinery (94.8%), and aerial means (23.5%) [6]. Extinguishing operations are dangerous because any accident can cause injuries or even deaths among the professionals. The government of Spain reports 24 accidents between 2006 and 2015 with 37 deaths, including only firefighting professionals [6].