Nearly 6,000 people had been forced to spend the night outside their home, their evacuation sometimes being in an emergency. Many started to return to their home thanks to the improvement of the situation.
In southern Spain, a drama was avoided on Monday evening when the fire resumed near Tarifa, Andalusia, an area very popular with tourists already struck last week.
« Temps record »
“We have experienced moments of extreme danger, because the flames arrived at the entrance to urban planning,” said the advisor to the interior of the Andalusian regional government Antonio Sanz, who added that the evacuations had taken place “in record time”.
Of some 2,000 people evacuated in this province of Cadiz, several hundred received authorization on Tuesday morning to return home.
In the same way, around 600 residents of several villages evacuated due to the fire which ravaged the natural site of Las Médulas-classified by UNESCO as World Heritage of Humanity-, in the Castille-et-Léon region, were able to return home on Tuesday morning, but several fires remained active in the same region, especially near Zamora.
A man was arrested, suspected of having voluntarily sparked a fire which had destroyed 2,200 ha in the province of Ávila.
Heat dome
In neighboring Portugal, the other country the hardest struck by fires, the bells sounded in the morning to give the alert in the village of Transcoso (center), site of the most disturbing claim, while a thick cloud of smoke rose away.
About 700 firefighters and airlines are on site, but the inhabitants have mobilized, sprinkling the land around their house using pipes in the hope of braking the advance of the flames.
Greece called on the European mechanism to combat forest fires in the face of new homes that have declared themselves. The most dangerous are on the island of Zante in the Ionian Sea (West), Vonitsa and Preveza, cities in the west of continental Greece as well as in the Department of Achaia in the west of the Peloponnese where around twenty preventive evacuations have been carried out.
Italy is not spared, with 11 cities placed on red alert due to the heat wave, including almost all the largest cities in the country (Rome, Milan, Turin, etc.).
In France, where a gigantic fire that burned 16,000 hectares was mastered on Sunday in the south, several areas of the South West and Center-East are on a heat wave.
“It is suffocating, there is no air, only concrete,” notes Andréa, 21, who approaches pedestrians on behalf of an association in Lyon (center-east).
“Made too hot,” complains Alain Bichot, 34, a good morning at the terrace in Dijon (center-east). “I still prefer to go to the office. At least there is the air conditioning, ”he adds.
“The heat wave currently affecting France, Spain and the Balkan countries is not surprising,” Akshays Deoras, a meteorology expert at the British University of Reading, in writing.
“It is led by a dome of heat that persists above Europe. Due to climate change, we now live in a significantly warmer world, and this reality increases both the frequency and intensity of heat waves, “he continued.
For example, Kosovo experienced its warmest day recorded in July with a temperature of 42.4 ° C in July.
Drought has become the daily reality for more than half of Europe, mainly for the Mediterranean periphery, for several months, a situation which has been an ideal ground for fires.
Alarming sign of a phenomenon that threatens all of Europe, the British environment agency said on Tuesday that the water shortage in England was now classified “of national importance”. The first six months of the year have been the driest since 1976, a year that had been marked by a very strong drought in Europe.
An air pollution alert was launched in London by the municipality and rail traffic was disrupted, dried up soils moving the trains.
In the southeast of the continent, the Balkans are also on the front line, whether it is Albania, where several hundred firefighters and soldiers fight fires, Montenegro or Croatia.