On the night of August 26, 2025, José Miguel López, environmental agent of the Sanabria region (Zamora), traveled the forest track alone in his SUV. Today alone, he has accumulated more than sixteen hours to fight a fire that has threatened to burn several villages in the region since the flames appeared in Porto more than two weeks ago.
In the bend that goes down towards the village of Cerdillo, we encounter another car. They both brake on the dirt road. In the other vehicle, Fernando Rodríguez Tábara, a local rancher, rolls down the window. José Miguel does the same. The two men look at each other. For a few seconds, no one said anything. Fernando looks for good news in the agent’s eyes. José Miguel shakes his head slowly.
“Come on, go home and let’s have coffee,” is the only thing Fernando manages to say.
Arriving at the village, José Miguel gets out of the car. His uniform is covered in a gray crust of smoke and ash, and his shoulders sag with fatigue. He doesn’t take his eyes off the ground. A couple of neighbors immediately approach him, surrounding him with questions, looking for answers, but also comfort. He straightens his back, composes his face and responds as best he can: he tries not to alarm, to organize the information, to bring a certain certainty in the midst of chaos.
He repeatedly declines invitations to have coffee and soft drinks. “I’m fine, thank you, what I need is to drink some water,” he replies kindly, constantly sipping from the bottle in his hand.
When the neighbors move away, José Miguel’s body gives way again. You no longer have to hide the fact that you can no longer bear the weight of frustration and discouragement.. He tells Fernando how the day went: an attempt at counter-fire which proved useless because the strong gusts of wind scattered the embers on the mountain and raised smoke so dense that it did not allow the machines to operate. One more day where they can’t say they managed to put out the fire.
Fernando insists once again about this coffee, so that they can go to his place to talk more calmly. José Miguel shakes his head again: “I can’t wait to get home, take off these clothes and take a shower,” he says. He can’t take it anymore. And tomorrow, at 8 a.m., again.
cry and talk
In Spain, there is still relatively little data on how the situations experienced by emergency professionals at work affect their mental health. In 2021, a study by the University of León among 24 forest firefighters working precisely in the Sanabria Natural Park showed that, throughout the fire campaign, worker anxiety increases by almost 50%and fatigue and emotional confusion peak after long days of confusion and feeling like you can’t control a fire.
A few days later, sitting on the terrace of La Casona, in Puebla de Sanabria, José Miguel seems calmer. The fire isn’t out yet, but at least he feels like it’s a little better under control. Now he speaks more relaxed, with a different breath, but without forgetting what he experienced. “These fires are unstoppable. They stop when the circumstances are right, but if that doesn’t happen, there is no God to stop them.”
This is not the first time that this environmental agent has been faced with a fire of this magnitude. With 26 years of experience, he has seen fires of all sizes, He has lived through entire summers chaining guards and days that seem eternalbut without a doubt, the one that devastated the Sierra de la Culebra in 2022, was the one that marked him the most: “I had a very bad time in Culebra”, he admits, while remembering that the fire reached the limit of his town and “two companions, risking their skin on a firebreak with crews and a lot of Portuguese, said: ‘it doesn’t go from here'”.
And that didn’t happen: “their cars were damaged, they burned a little, they jumped, but they continued behind it and managed to put it out,” he says enthusiastically. After that, she said, the only thing she could do was cry a lot and talk a lot at home.
During this year’s fires, he says he handled the situation better because he was already mentally prepared. In addition They benefited from psychological assistance at all times: “The psychologist came to see how we were doing. Anyone who wanted could talk to her, it was voluntary. It helped me, now I’m much better.”
Normalize
Darío Rebollo has been working in maritime rescue for thirteen years: he started as a sailor on offshore tugs and worked in the north, in the Levant and the Canary Islands before ending up in Andalusia, covering the strait area, where he is the captain of a Salvamar, the rapid intervention vessels.
During this period, he experienced almost everything at sea: he knows well what it is like to arrive at night on an overturned boat “and the only thing you hear is screams everywhere”, he says. He has recovered the dead on numerous occasions and towed drug boats in the middle of a storm.. It also responds to pleasure boat emergencies: retired sailboats left adrift, luxury yachts running out of gas and small excursion boats that drift too close to the shore.
In his job, he recalls, it doesn’t matter who is on the other side: “My job is to save people in danger. My worst enemy is sailing and I save him,” he says emphatically.
Experiencing these emergency situations takes its toll, although he admits that over time it eventually becomes “normalized”. “You get a kind of armor. It’s something you see a lot, although it’s true that your character changes,” he says. When there’s a particularly stressful day, the quick exit solution is simple: “You’re going to have a beer with your friends… silence falls… and tomorrow is another day.”
From the ground, Alfonso Iza tries to ensure that neither armor nor beer is the only defense. He is responsible for the prevention of professional risks in maritime rescue and knows that the 1,574 professionals of SASEMAR “are exposed to a series of images, events, experiences which have affected their personal lives”.
To mitigate these consequences, after the pandemic, they started working with Yes !an external psychology company that provides telephone support, video calls and physical visits to the fleet, coordination centers and their families. Darío confirmed this when he was promoted to skipper and had to manage a crew several years older than him.: “In addition to letting off steam, it helped me a lot that he gave me a professional point of view, on things that I was not able to see,” he says.
According to their latest report, between January 2023 and May 2025, they served 155 workers during 1,327 sessions. The most common symptomatology is anxiety, present in 85% of cases in 2025 and in 90% the previous year, followed by sadness, apathy, stress, irritability and sleep disorders.
sleeping pills
Sleep disturbances are what Julio notices the most when working in emergency situations. He has been responsible for the 112 Coordination Center in Catalonia since 2023 and his job is to answer calls and direct them to the units. “In summer, we can create between 100 and 120 incidents per shift, alone, not counting complaints and inappropriate calls,” he explains.
He only works at night, from noon to eight, 32 hours a week: every day, on constant alert. “It’s eight hours of adrenaline. One thing is adaptive stress, which is normal, and another thing is chronic anxiety.”
Little by little, his body began to notice the imbalance. Living at night and sleeping during the day altered his circadian cycles: he came home exhausted but was unable to fall asleep. “When I stopped sleeping well, I was a lot more upset, a lot more reactive. The slightest minor problem was like drowning in a glass of water,” he admits today.
After a year, he had an anxiety attack. “That’s when they started giving me citalopram.” Since then, he has combined antidepressants, lorazepam to help him sleep and melatonin that he brings from abroad. Since he has been there, he has seen several colleagues who accompanied him leave him: “There are people who can’t stand it because every call was stressful, they got super nervous and got stuck,” he remembers.
He was able to continue because, in addition to the medication, he says psychologically, he learned to protect himself in his own way: “We normalize things, we normalize shouting, fights, accidents”, and he admits that this has changed him: “Maybe now I am much more insensitive than before”, he admits.
Prevention and limits
The World Health Organization has been warning for years about the impact of emergencies on the mental health of the population, but it also insists on taking care of that of those who respond to these crises. In one of its reports on teams deployed after recent disasters, WHO found that many emergency workers continued to suffer high levels of stress weeks after the incidents and very few had access to psychological support.
For this reason, from Salvamento Marítimo, they insist on the need to also include mental health in prevention plans: “We control the number of emergencies experienced by each of the units, and when we detect a significant volume, we ask that they organize, preventively, even if no one has requested it, a workshop in these units”, explains Izan, responsible for professional risks.
“What they need most – says Izan, speaking of emergency professionals – is to feel listened to, to feel that they are not alone, that they are not the only ones suffering from these types of symptoms. This is something normal after an emergency situation.”
“The emotional burden of this job is enormous,” admits José Miguel, in Sanabria, taking a sip of his drink. He admits to talking about it often with his colleagues and friends, as well as other fire service veterans.: “It’s a question of resistance,” he says, referring to the strength of not giving in to the frustration of not being able to put out a fire.
At the 112 Coordination Center, Julio knows that the company provides telephone numbers and applications for psychological help, but he considers them “bandits” even though the conditions remain the same: night shifts, anxiety, stress and an outsourced service with a telemarketing agreement that has little to do with his business.
He can’t afford to leave this job because he needs the salary. to support himself until he finishes his psychology studies. For now, he says, he plans to hold on for another four years: “It’s not the worst job in the world. It also has its advantages, and that’s why people hold on. But we hold on as long as we can,” says Julio.
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