About 14,000 people had been evacuated from France’s Gironde region by Saturday afternoon as more than 1,200 firefighters battled to bring the flames under control, regional authorities said in a statement. read more “We have a fire that will continue to spread until it is stabilized,” Vincent Ferrier, Langon’s deputy mayor in the Gironde, told a news conference. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Fires have ravaged France in recent weeks, as well as other European countries including Portugal and Spain, and more than 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) of land were torched in the Gironde region on Saturday, up from 7,300 hectares on Friday. In the latest weather warning, 38 of France’s 96 departments were put on “orange” alert, with residents of those areas urged to be vigilant. The heat wave in western France is expected to peak on Monday, with temperatures climbing above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). In neighboring Spain, firefighters were battling a number of blazes on Saturday after days of unusually high temperatures that reached 45.7 degrees Celsius (114 F). The nearly week-long heatwave has caused 360 heat-related deaths, according to data from the Carlos III Health Institute. More than 3,000 people were forced from their homes by a large fire near Mijas, a city in Malaga province popular with northern European tourists, the region’s emergency services said in a tweet early Saturday. Many were taken to a shelter in a provincial sports center. “The police were going up and down the street with their sirens on and they told everyone to leave. Just leave. There are no instructions where to go,” said British pensioner John Pretty, 83. “It’s scary … because you don’t know what’s going on,” said 68-year-old Belgian resident Jean-Marie Vandelanotte. Elsewhere in Spain, thick black clouds of smoke rose into the air near Casas de Miravete in the Extremadura region as helicopters dropped water on the flames that have burned 3,000 hectares, forced the evacuation of two villages and threatened to reach the Monfrague national park. Flames are seen during a wildfire, amid the second heatwave of the year, in the area of Casas de Miravete, Spain, July 16, 2022. REUTERS/Isabel Infantes read more Fires were also burning in the central region of Castile and León and in Galicia to the north. There was some respite for firefighters in Portugal, where temperatures fell across most of the country on Saturday after reaching around 40 C (104 F) in recent days. “We’ve had big fires and we don’t want them to reactivate… We will maintain extreme vigilance this weekend,” Emergency and Civil Protection Authority commander Andre Fernandez told reporters. A total of 39,550 hectares (98,000 acres) were destroyed by fires from the start of the year to mid-June, more than triple the area destroyed by fires in the same period last year, according to data from the Nature and Forestry Conservation Institute. shown. An area equivalent to nearly two-thirds of that has burned during wildfires in the past week. Portugal’s health ministry announced that 238 people died as a result of the heat between July 7 and 13, most of them elderly people with underlying illnesses.
MOROCCO BLAZES
Across the Mediterranean from Europe, fires in Morocco have ripped through more than 2,000 hectares of forest in the northern regions of Larache, Ouazzane, Taza and Tetouane, killing at least one person, local authorities said. More than 1,000 households were evacuated from their villages and planes carrying water helped put out most of the fires by Friday night, although firefighters were still struggling to extinguish three hot spots near Larache. In Britain, the national weather forecaster issued its first red warning of “extreme heat” for parts of England on Monday and Tuesday. With possibly record temperatures expected, the government’s emergency response committee was due to meet later on Saturday. The highest recorded temperature in Britain was 38.7 C (101.7 F), recorded in Cambridge on 25 July 2019. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Reporting by Layli Faroudi in Paris, Sergio Gonclaves in Lisbon, Mariano Valladolid and Jon Nazca in Malaga, Ahmed Eljechtimi in Rabat and Jessica Jones and Michael Holden in London Writing by Helen Popper Editing by Frances Kerry and Christina Fincher Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
