Valencia: The Union assembled its largest firefighting force yet this summer, and the fires have wasted little time testing it. Through the bloc’s civil protection mechanism, 22 firefighting aeroplanes and five helicopters stand on call across a dozen countries, backed by 777 firefighters pre-positioned in the Mediterranean states most exposed to a burning July.

That deployment, the biggest since the standby scheme began earlier this decade, has already been drawn down hard. Portugal called for Union assistance on 3 July and France followed two days later, each triggering aircraft dispatched within hours from partner states. The pooled fleet is meant to catch exactly this: national services stretched past their limit by fires arriving faster and fiercer than the calendar once suggested.

By late July the demand had only grown. As blazes tore through southern France and eastern Spain, the Union moved to send more planes into both countries, and Spain saw six aircraft mobilised from Greece, Italy and a partner across the Mediterranean, alongside scores of personnel and vehicles sent overland from Portugal. Satellite mapping from the bloc’s earth-observation service fed commanders rapid images of where the flames were headed.

The mechanism rests on a simple bargain. Assets financed by the Union deploy when a member state’s own capacity, and the reserves it shares with neighbours, are not enough. In practice that means a Swedish water bomber over a French valley or an Italian crew on a Spanish ridgeline, coordinated from a single emergency centre rather than through a scramble of bilateral phone calls.

The scale of this year’s standby reflects a grim trend rather than an abundance of caution. Fire seasons across southern Europe have lengthened and intensified, and heat records have fallen with numbing regularity. Officials no longer speak of exceptional years; they plan for the exception to be the rule and size their fleets accordingly.

Even the largest deployment on record has limits. Aircraft cannot fly through the worst smoke and turbulence, crews tire, and two or three simultaneous emergencies can exhaust a pool built for one. Every plane sent to Spain is a plane not circling over Greece, and the mechanism’s planners spend the summer managing that arithmetic in real time.

There is a prevention argument the fleet cannot answer on its own. Analysts warn that pouring money into aircraft treats the symptom while the causes, drier landscapes, abandoned rural land and a warming climate, keep worsening. The Union funds forest management and early-warning work too, but those investments move slowly against a fire that moves in minutes.

For the communities under the smoke this month, the calculus is immediate. The shared fleet has put water on flames that national services alone could not reach, and in a summer like this one, that reach is the difference the mechanism was built to make.