Firefighters on Monday battled massive wildfires threatening the French city of Bordeaux, while crews in Spain struggled to contain a series of wildfires that have been raging since last week, as a result of an extremely hot and dry summer in Western Europe, UNN reports citing Reuters.
Details
About 220,000 people have been evacuated in France, while in neighboring Spain over 75,000 people were ordered to leave their homes and another 30,000 to stay indoors, authorities said over the weekend.
The fires in France, which broke out last week near the Atlantic coast, are now only 15 kilometers from the entry points to the main Bordeaux metropolitan area.
"This is a fire of a scale never seen before," said the mayor of Cestas, Jérôme Steffe, on Monday. Cestas is one of the suburbs located near the central part of Bordeaux.
In Spain, fires raged in the central provinces of Madrid, Ávila, and Toledo. According to Environment Minister Sara Aagesen, the flames devastated over 50,000 hectares of countryside in Ávila, making it the largest wildfire in Spain's modern history.
A separate fire in the eastern province of Castellón in Spain devastated over 6,500 hectares, regional authorities reported.
The wildfires around Bordeaux in southwestern France have dealt a shock to the regional economy, Finance Minister Roland Lescure said on Monday. The region is one of the centers of French winemaking and a major tourism hub.
"It is like a thunderbolt for a region that could have done without it," Lescure told journalists.
The government of President Emmanuel Macron will discuss the wildfire situation at a cabinet meeting on Monday.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that on Tuesday his government will declare a civil protection emergency for the central provinces affected by the wildfires, which will allow additional funds for recovery.
According to Sánchez, more than 150,000 hectares have burned in Spain since January, six times more than in the same period last year.
In both Bordeaux and Ávila, the average July temperature was 32 degrees Celsius, almost 6°C above the normal monthly maximum between 1961 and 1990, according to the Reuters Climate Monitor.
The scale of wildfires this summer in Europe is putting pressure on firefighting resources and raising questions about how to respond.
Under the European Union's civil protection mechanism, Greece and Italy each sent two Canadair aircraft to drop water to extinguish the fires, while Portugal deployed over 100 military personnel along with equipment.
According to Spain's Ministry of the Interior, two more aircraft were expected to arrive from Turkey.
According to forecasts from France's meteorological service, French firefighters hope to take advantage of more favorable conditions on Monday, before temperatures rise again to 37°C later this week in the Bordeaux area.
"It is a race against time before the heat returns," said Steffe, the mayor of Cestas.