Europe’s worst wildfire summer in years. Three countries. One recurring factor.
France, Spain and Greece told the same story in different languages this summer — and ageing overhead electrical infrastructure keeps appearing in it.
Open any European newspaper this summer and you find the same story, told in different languages.
France, Gironde — July 2026. The largest wildfire in France since 1949. 42,000 hectares burned. 250,000 people evacuated, possibly the largest peacetime evacuation in French history. The fire was sparked near a high-voltage line operated by a local distribution operator.
Spain, Almería — July 2026. At least 12 people killed, 23 missing. Investigators are looking at a fallen electrical cable as the most likely cause.
Greece, summer 2026. Fires linked to the ageing electricity network account for 75% of all land burned this year. Much of the overhead infrastructure dates from the 1960s, with investment frozen during the debt crisis after 2009.
Three countries. Three tragedies. One pattern: unmonitored, ageing overhead electrical infrastructure failing silently — and then catastrophically.
Europe’s wildfires have burned nearly 500,000 hectares in 2026. The economic damage is estimated at up to €19 billion. The human cost does not have a figure.
The uncomfortable part
None of this is a story about exotic failure modes. Conductors sag when they are hot and heavily loaded. Vegetation grows into clearance envelopes. Hardware corrodes, joints loosen, foundations shift. Every one of these is a well-understood physical process with a well-understood timeline.
What is missing is not knowledge of how overhead lines fail. It is observation of the specific assets, continuously, at the moment they begin to.
A transmission or distribution corridor is inspected on a schedule — by crew, by helicopter, sometimes by drone. Between two inspections, the asset is unobserved. In terrain like the Dinaric Alps, or the Gironde pine forest, or a Greek hillside, that interval is long and the terrain is exactly the kind where a small ignition stops being small very quickly.
This is deployable engineering, not a research programme
The technology to continuously monitor transmission towers and overhead lines in real time exists today. Detecting mechanical stress, line sag, conductor anomalies and structural deterioration before they cascade into failures is not a distant ambition. Sensors that clip onto existing towers, a communication layer that works where cellular does not, and analytics that flag departures from an asset’s own baseline — all of it is available now.
The barrier is not capability. It is that continuous monitoring has historically been treated as a capital project competing against other capital projects, rather than as the thing that tells you which capital projects to do first.
At LoRaSi this is the problem we are working on with SAMSTEO, currently in active pilot deployment with CGES, the Montenegrin transmission system operator.
Europe cannot afford another summer like this one.