A heat wave forecast to hit France and Spain this week threatens to hamper firefighting efforts as Europe’s worst wildfires in decades rage.
France’s weather service has forecast temperatures reaching 40 degrees Celsius from Tuesday, while Spain’s AEMET warned of new heat from Wednesday to the end of the week, with a high of 42 degrees Celsius in the northeast and 39 degrees Celsius in central regions.
Officials said rising temperatures, dry winds and low humidity will raise the wildfire risk to “extreme” levels, even as forests have become drier due to frequent heat waves this year.
Thousands of firefighters and water-dropping planes rushed to control the blaze before temperatures rose further.
Experts have linked the scale of the fires to increasingly frequent and intense heat waves caused by climate change, as hotter and drier conditions are making wildfires more destructive.
Macron warned of ‘difficult’ times
In France, President Emmanuel Macron said a fire in the Landes region had been brought under control, but a much larger wildfire near Bordeaux continued to burn after burning about 42,000 hectares, forcing the evacuation of about 220,000 people and destroying hundreds of homes.
“The coming weeks will be difficult. We have to be determined,” Macron said.
In Spain, wildfires west of Madrid and other areas have forced about 60,000 people to flee.
With the coming heat wave threatening to spread the wildfires further, Spain’s Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlasca said the coming hours would be “absolutely decisive” in bringing the blaze burning west of the capital Madrid under control.
Nearly 150,000 hectares of land have burned in Spain and 115,000 hectares in France since the beginning of the year.
At a campsite near Navaluenga, west of the capital, devastated by Spain’s worst wildfire on record, site co-owner María Ángeles Cañete said her family had lost everything.
“We had this campsite, we had another one and we’ve lost everything. We have nothing,” he told AFP news agency.
EU firefighting resources depleted
The European Union deployed extra firefighting aircraft to France, while EU Commissioner Hadja Lahbib warned that resources were under increasing pressure as severe fire conditions spread across southern and central Europe.
“Extreme conditions are at risk for France, the Iberian Peninsula, as well as Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic… where conditions are expected to worsen from today, including Portugal,” Lahabib said.
In Italy, a wildfire in the southern Puglia region forced hundreds of tourists to evacuate from beaches and campgrounds, officials said.
Edited by: Dmytro Lyubenko
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