SPAIN – Nearly 200,000 people have been forced from their homes and holiday resorts in the face of massive, uncontained wildfires in France and Spain. Spanish firefighters hoped to get control of wildfires raging near capital Madrid on Saturday, but an official warned that erratic winds threatened to fan the blazes further, as thick grey smoke filled the sky west of the city.
Carlos Novillo, the Madrid regional government’s emergency management chief, said the wildfire near the capital was “at its peak and is currently beyond the capacity of firefighters to contain”. Spain’s interior ministry said the flames have ravaged nearly 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) in the Madrid region and “between 13,000 and 15,000 hectares” in the neighbouring province of Avila. The total is more than twice the surface area of the French capital, Paris.
Two separate wildfires combined on Friday to become one huge blaze, which was close to merging with yet another in the neighbouring Castilla y Leon region. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was scheduled to attend an emergency planning meeting on Saturday morning in Cenicientos, a village at the heart of the fire zone, and speak to the media afterwards.
In France, authorities on Saturday evacuated thousands of people from suburbs near Bordeaux as wildfires in areas around the city showed no signs of abating. Sophie Brocas, who heads the local administration of La Nouvelle-Aquitaine et de la Gironde, which covers the Bordeaux region, said the areas of Le Haillan, Eysines and Merignac were being cleared out.
The Bordeaux region is famed for its vineyards and the city is one of the main transport hubs for tourists visiting nearby holiday resorts on the Atlantic coast. Around 44,000 people fled the upmarket Cap Ferret peninsula south of Bordeaux, with the only road threatened by flames. Boats moved hundreds of people away from the fires, while others drove off the peninsula, known for its millionaire residences. More than 50 houses there have been destroyed.
French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said more than 141,000 people had so far been evacuated from the Gironde and Landes regions. “The fires which are hitting our country have reached a level that has never been seen before”, Lecornu wrote on X on Saturday. The French army has also been drafted in to help, while Macron has asked the European Union for help.
Lecornu ordered the army to deploy a military transport aircraft to help with its wildfire suppression operations, his office said. Around 100 Paris firefighters have also been deployed to help, Arnaud de Cacqueray, commander of the Paris Fire Brigade, told the AFP news agency. De Cacqueray said he expected the deployment to have an impact on response times in Paris, adding people should contact firefighters in the capital “only in cases of absolute emergency”.
Some European regions have suffered at least two heatwaves since May. And drought blamed on human-fuelled climate change has heightened the threat from wildfires this year, the World Weather Attribution group said in a study published this week. (Aljazeera)
