Madrid, Spain – Sally Chapman was watching the Wimbledon tennis championship on television when she noticed a “commotion” outside their home in Bedar, a tiny village in southern Spain, so her husband went outside to investigate.

So began what she remembers as the worst night of her life.

It was July 9 and the forest fire that raged in Bedar and Los Gallardos, in Almeria, ultimately killed 14 people and saw more than 1,500 people evacuated.

“There were five British people, friends of mine and others in the village, who died in the fire that night. Another close female friend is still fighting for her life in hospital,” she said. “It was probably the most terrifying thing that has ever happened. As we left [as evacuees], there were plumes of white smoke. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, our house is going to burn.’”

On the night of the fire, when they reached the nearby village of Lubrin, they received an “amazing response” and were offered a bed in a woman’s house.

The Almeria fire was among the deadliest blazes in Spain in recent years. As it spread, other forest fires threatened parts of France and Greece.

Chapman returned home days later.

“But what happens is there is a kind of survivor’s guilt,” the 62-year-old retired mediator told Al Jazeera.

‘This can’t happen again’

Bedar, a tiny village of just more than 1,000 residents, has one local police officer.

Chapman said church bells were rung and neighbours warned them to leave. A passing civil guard officer also told them to go the same way.

“This tragedy will never be forgotten. The ninth of July was a dark day for Bedar. What could have gone wrong did go wrong,” she said.

Chapman is part of a residents’ group campaigning to stop a repeat of this tragedy.

“This can’t happen again. We are going to be pressing any political party to put in the protocols to stop this happening again,” she said.

As wildfires have been tearing through forests across Europe, forcing residents to flee and filling the sky with smoke, Ferran Dalmau has been a front-line witness to the chaos they are wreaking across the continent.

An expert firefighting analyst with the Spanish Ministry of Interior, Dalmau has been working with a small team to try to stop the flames destroying more homes and livelihoods and threatening lives.

Though many of the blazes are starting to ease, there are concerns that intense heatwaves raise the risk of more fires.

In southwest France’s Gironde region and the mountainous Var department, wildfires scorched tens of thousands of hectares before stabilising. Officials say the country’s largest blaze since 1949 is now under control but still not fully extinguished.

In central Spain, fires that burned through tens of thousands of hectares near Madrid have been brought under control, allowing many evacuees to return home, even as crews battle flare-ups and new hotspots in provinces including Leon and Caceres.

Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, and scientists warn that rising temperatures, prolonged drought and strong winds are turning southern Europe, especially France and Spain, into a far more flammable landscape, with the number of summer days featuring fire-prone conditions more than doubling since the early 1980s.

Dalmau, a volunteer member of the Forest Fires Assessment and Advisory Team (FAST), saw with his own eyes how huge blazes merged into one at Almorox in Toledo and in Avila – threatening to join a third to create one mammoth fire near Madrid.

“The most recent data was that about 66,000 hectares [163,000 acres] was destroyed, but we think in the end the final area which was burned was between 70,000 and 80,000 [173,000 to 198,000 acres],” he told Al Jazeera.

The three fires that merged into one were caused by “gross carelessness involving heavy machinery, a vehicle that caught fire on a road, and alleged negligence near a housing development, and these factors converged to create the largest fire in our history,” Dalmau said.

As part of a group of experts working on the front line and remotely, he offers rare insight into the battle behind the scenes to try to bring these huge fires under control.

“Our work mainly involves behavioural analysis and supporting decision-making,” he said.

Like everyone else, he gets scared when faced with fires bearing down on him.

“This is a hazard of the job. In our trade, not being afraid can make you reckless. The important thing is not to let fear get the better of you. You must stay calm and put your knowledge into practice,” Dalmau said. “And remain calm in front of the team, of course, to help keep everyone calm. If you panic, you are a danger to yourself and everyone else.”

Courage, he said, is the ability to control fear “and to use it to enhance your situational awareness”.

Dalmau said the Navarre Forestry Agenda, a regional government body dedicated to improving firefighting methods, estimates that it costs $11,534 to firefight each hectare. This means that just combating the recent fires near Madrid has cost up to $923m.

However, this does not include the cost of damage, restoration and environmental and economic impacts, he adds.

‘An absolute disaster’

The Spanish government has not released a figure for the economic cost of fighting the recent fires around the capital.

For Esteban Carrasco, the owner of the Monasterio de Pelayos campsite outside Madrid, the cost was all too obvious.

He said about half of the mobile homes were burned down when the fire reached the site on July 24.

“About 200 campers had to evacuate. Their homes were destroyed. They come here every year to enjoy nature. But the homes on the other side of the road escaped the fire. It was an absolute disaster. It will take ages to rebuild, but at least no one was hurt,” he told Al Jazeera.

In June, Spain announced a forest fire plan which involved 13 ministries, including the army, the forest fire brigades and state security forces, working together.

Despite this, Spain was forced to call for help for water-bombing planes from across Europe when the worst blazes in its history started in July