All of Spain is on Friday on a heat wave and the fire front on Friday continues to worry the authorities, especially since the meteorological agency has issued a “very high to extreme” risk notice for a large part of the country.
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The whole peninsula remains on a heat wave alert for the thirteenth consecutive day, and even Cantabria, the northern region, hitherto spared, will experience a peak of temperatures that can exceed 40 degrees, said the national meteorological agency AEMET, warning against the risk of fire “very high or extreme in most of the country (…) until Monday inclusive”.
The country is experiencing a very intense fire season with 157,501 hectares already reduced to ashes since the start of the year according to the European Information System on Forest Fires (Effis). However, we are still far from the 306,000 hectares who left for smoke in 2022.
AFP
Spain has recorded three deaths in these fires, including two young volunteers thirties who have perished while trying to turn off the fire in Castile-et-León (northwest) where a dozen lights remain very active.
Marcos Ratón works on a pig farm in Sonández de Tábara, near one of the fires that led to the evacuation of several thousand inhabitants. When he and his friends saw the fire arrive on Tuesday, they took backpacks, firebed, watering pipes. They put “appropriate clothes and (went) there to give a hand,” Marcos told AFP.
“Barely arrived, we started to see people burned, a car in flames, a burned tractor, warehouses, garages …”, explains the thirty -something who felt a great “helplessness”.
AFP
Convinced that there was no longer “nothing to burn” after the devastating fires of 2022 in the region, he now says he is convinced that “it will continue to happen to us year after year” and find that the population is “abandoned”.
Ángel Román, mayor of Ferreruela, a close commune, believes that “general cleaning around all the villages should be carried out to form a safety strip”, in particular “clearing and cleaning around houses”. “The campaign, if clean, can stop the fire,” he thinks.
In this context, the two main parties, PSOE (Socialist) and PP (Curator), are rocked on the management of fires, in a country where their extinction is in principle of the competence of the regions, the central government intervening in the event of a large -scale claim. He can notably mobilize the highly requested emergency military unit (UME) in recent days.
AFP
The PP accuses the government of having reduced the airlines, while the PSOE defends itself and criticizes the leaders of the “absent” opposition from the field, accusing some of being on vacation while their region is plagued by flames.
In Greece, which also faces a wave of fires, the situation has improved on the majority of fronts due to a drop in temperatures and the intensity of the wind, firefighters said.
The latter are however mobilized around Patras – the third city in the country which has 250,000 inhabitants – faced with “scattered” homes and remain vigilant as to possible times of fires.
The most active fire remains that of the island of Chios, in the northeast of the Aegean Sea. Eight planes are always deployed to try to end it.
In the south of the Aegean Sea, in Attica and in the Peloponnese, the risk of fire remains very high, warned civil protection on Friday.
