English
Português
Deutsch
Eco123 Revista da Economia e Ecologia
Saturday, 21st december 2024.
This story brings the year 2024 to an end and welcomes in the New Year of 2025, a year that begins with the hope that things will get better, in every respect. Because improving the protection we give to Nature also helps to protect our fauna and flora and, ultimately, the conservation of our climate and our surrounding nature will benefit people themselves, both in terms of health and financially. It is against this background that I tell you this story…
Not so long ago, a good-looking young lady was waiting for me in a huge pick-up truck parked in the driveway of our house. She was from Silves and had been working for a week for a company that worked for EDP, which worked for E-Redes, which worked for some subcontractor in Silves, who usually has to deliver bad news. I was taking my green waste to the compost heap and was surprised when this lady approached me. She told me that they would have to cut down our 120-year-old umbrella pine tree as it was interfering with the three high-voltage power lines that E-Redes had strung across our property, which I could not confirm…
I answered her most clearly, informing her that not a single tree on this plot of the new botanical garden in Caldas de Monchique would be felled by any company that cannot even employ or pay its staff properly. E-Redes is a company of the still “near-monopolistic” EDP, in which almost all services are outsourced, i.e. this company now employs many freelancers, to whom it does not have to pay any social insurance and pays well below the standard freelance rate. E-Redes is therefore a company that has hardly any employees of its own (apart from a few engineers) and whose business model exploits people and leaves them without the most basic rights of employment. Things used to be different, but times have changed. EDP-Distribuição now has a different name, and it has a child called E-Redes; it just wears different clothes, like the Chinese emperor who is naked when he undresses: it is still EDP-Distribuição. And this sham company has its high-voltage power lines suspended above houses and trees, which are then partly responsible for starting forest fires. See, for example, the Monchique forest fire, which broke out on Friday, 3 August, 2018, at 13:30, sparked by a high-voltage cable in contact with a eucalyptus tree. Because it takes electricity to start a fire…
See:
http://monchique-alerta.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/FINAL-Relatorio-Monchique.pdf
High-voltage lines belong in the ground. In every modern EU country from Finland to Spain, high-voltage lines are first insulated and then laid underground. They even do this in China. That’s why there are fewer forest fires there too. Only in Portugal and the USA, more precisely in California, another somewhat technically backward country on this planet, are the copper cables laid and stretched over land without insulation, where they then sag at high temperatures and touch trees in strong winds, causing flying sparks, which in turn trigger forest fires. But Portugal is also a country at the farmost southern end of Europe. They don’t take technological progress and innovation very seriously here. There is already something like a fire department that is supposed to extinguish the burning eucalyptus monocultures. At least in theory, because, in practice, burning eucalyptus trees cannot be extinguished. It’s a bit like trying to put out a burning car with a bucket of water. The fire laughs at the simplicity of humans. In Monchique, however, the fire departments have already learned this from their own experience. You live on top of a volcano when you settle in Monchique.
The E-Redes have still not come up with the idea of insulating their exposed cables. All you would need is a can of spray to insulate the cables with plastic. You can coat cable harnesses with liquid plastic…
That’s why, at the Esgravatadouro CRL cooperative, we have made an invention and turned it into a short film. Just take a look at the movie. We have been doing this for three years now, collecting all the rainwater in gutters and channelling it into cisterns and using the rainwater in the dry summer months when high-voltage power lines should touch our trees, which they don’t: we put out forest fires right at the beginning of a crisis, so that Nature is protected from the profit interests of the power company.
Both EDP and E-Redes earn a lot of money with their electricity, whatever the cost, but our sprinkler system protects nature from the profit interests of that industry: it stops forest fires before they start, and puts them out. The petite lady who worked for E-Redes in a roundabout way has since found a better job. Delivering bad news was not her thing. She much prefers to deliver good news. With this in mind, here’s wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year…
