The south-west of France, Portugal and Spain plagued by devastating fires

Several fires are still raging in the south-west of France, Portugal and Spain while, further north, the United Kingdom has gone on red alert, fearing temperatures never reached. Scorching temperatures and a series of fires persisted on Saturday, July 16, in the south-west of France as well as in the Iberian Peninsula, hit by a second heat wave in barely a month. The multiplication of these phenomena is a direct consequence of global warming according to scientists, greenhouse gas emissions increasing both their intensity, their duration and their frequency. In Portugal, affected for a week by scorching temperatures and a series of fires, the services emergency services identified a dozen active fires on Friday evening, which mobilized more than 900 firefighters. Crash of a water bomber in Portugal According to civil protection, these fires killed two people, including the pilot of a water bomber – a medium-sized aircraft, type FireBoss – which crashed in the early evening while fighting forest fires near Vila Nova de Foz Coa, in the northern region of Guarda. Also in northern Portugal, one of the most worrying fires was raging in the municipality of Baiao, a hilly area in the Porto region, upstream from the Douro, the great river that crosses it. there are fires here, but usually it’s not so strong”, testified to AFP Maria, a 71-year-old retired teacher living in the village of Eiriz. On July 15, a little more than 30,000 hectares have gone up in smoke in Portugal since the beginning of the year, the highest figure on this date since 2017, a year marked by violent forest fires which had killed a hundred people. Friday, temperatures had reached 47 degrees the day before in the north, a record for a month of July in this country. ravaged some 7700 hectares since Tuesday, one south of Bordeaux where “the thesis c riminelle” is now “privileged” and the other in the forest backed by the very touristy Pilat dune. “Here, there were tunnels of fire, you have to imagine a ball of fire”, told AFP the commander Laurent Dellac, who spoke from La Teste-de-Buch. These disasters, which mobilize a thousand firefighters, have since Tuesday resulted in the evacuation of 11,000 people. “the impression that it’s post-apocalyptic, really, it’s falling everywhere, on cars, it’s worrying,” said Karyn, a resident of Cazaux, a village near the Pilat dune. Triggered Thursday afternoon by the passage of a train which would have generated sparks, another fire spread over 1,205 hectares (without necessarily consuming them) near Avignon, in the south-east, before being circumscribed. A protected natural area threatened in Spain On the Spanish side, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in a tweet that he was very “attentive to the evolution of the active fires which have led to the evacuation of several municipalities”, evoking “an extreme risk in the face of very high temperatures”. The most worrying of these fires was that of Extremadura, a border region of Portugal, where thousands of hectares have burned in recent days . This was experiencing an “unfavorable development” and threatened the Monfragüe National Park, a natural area protected for its biodiversity. Another forest fire worried the authorities in Mijas, just a few dozen kilometers from Malaga, Andalusia (south ), where 2,300 people from surrounding communities were dislodged, according to the emergency services. a mercury above 40 degrees. On the other side of the Mediterranean, a person died in the fires which ravage remote wooded regions of northern Morocco, according to the authorities. 03:35 Risk of “extreme heat” in the United KingdomThis heat wave will spread further north from the weekend. In the UK, which issued an ‘extreme heat’ red alert for the first time for Monday and Tuesday, people are preparing for potentially never-before-seen temperatures. “We hoped never to come to this situation, but, for the first time we have forecasts that exceed 40C in the UK,” said Dr Nikos Christidis, a climate scientist. The all-time temperature record in this country (38.7 degrees) dates from 2019. The NHS public health service has warned of a “jump” in heat-related hospitalizations. Ireland and Belgium are also expecting to a scorching start to the week with temperatures that can reach 32 and 38 degrees respectively locally. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has also warned of poor air quality, an aspect “unfortunately omitted from these waves of heat”, according to the scientific officer Lorenzo Labrador, who evokes the “high concentrations of atmospheric pollutants and ozone levels”. With AFP