“This looks like the end of the world.” The residents of Pombal, in the Leiría region, had never seen a similar fire. And that in Portugal -as in Spain- fire is a known enemy that reappears every year to wage battle. The extreme weather conditions this summer, however, have unleashed an inferno of flames in the neighboring country that has reached 120 active fires at the same time from north to south of the country and has raised fears of scenes like those experienced in the fateful 2017 , when 64 people perished in the flames.
After more than a week at the limit, Portugal woke up on Sunday on alert but with the fires under control. The Government of António Costa reduced its response level to “state of alert”, after having declared a “state of contingency” for the first time to deal with the fire. Yesterday, there is still a large active focus, near the municipality of Chaves, in the extreme north of the country, but Civil Protection said that it was “practically controlled” in 90% of its perimeter. The 940 people forced to evacuate their homes have already been able to return, but the flames have claimed dozens of injuries and one fatality, a pilot of a firefighting plane who died when he crashed in the municipality of Castelo Melhor, in Vila Nova of Foz Coa, in the northeast of the country.
The Portuguese authorities do not take the battle for granted and will review the alert situation on Tuesday. It is impossible to lower our guard after the 47 degrees registered last week in Pinhão-Santa Barbara, and before what is coming: a new increase in temperatures in this heat wave that is putting southern Europe in check and that could beat records in the next few days.
The fires have destroyed more than 12,000 hectares in Portugal. In Spain, with two deceased and more than 25,000 hectares devastated, the evolution is very worrying. But in our northern neighbor, France, the situation is directly critical.
Firefighters fought throughout the night on Sunday against the fire that is devouring the forest of the Landiras sector, in Gironde, in the southwest of the country, meter by meter. The wind reactivated the outbreaks over the weekend, devouring 14,000 hectares of vegetation and causing the evacuation of more than 16,000 people, reported ‘Le Parisien’. The surface calcined by the flames is already equivalent to that of Paris.
The French Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin, yesterday announced new reinforcements for the 1,700 firefighters fighting the fire – with three additional planes – and more firewalls to stop the fire in Landiras, further west of the country, where this strategy has managed to reduce its expansion.
The west of the country is on “red alert”. “Particularly intense heat is expected, not a typical summer heat wave,” François Gourand, meteorologist for Météo France, told AFP. Temperatures could be between 38ºC and 40ºC in much of the country and, according to this meteorological service, “some areas of the southwest” could experience “a heat apocalypse” with up to 44ºC.
Nor should we fail to observe the evolution of the fires in Greece. Another country at the mercy of fire where the fires declared in recent days have led the authorities to preventively evacuate seven villages in Crete. Although the situation is currently under control, we must not forget that last year around this time the country reached peaks of 45°C in a “nightmare summer” (as Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called it) in which more than 400 forest fires were recorded.
Experts agree that high temperatures respond to climate change and that they will increase each year. In fact, in Europe we have had two extreme heat waves in less than a month. The United Kingdom has issued a red alert for the first time in history for temperatures of 40 degrees in some regions of the country, and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute has activated the National Heat Plan pending temperatures that could exceed 39 degrees .
UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned yesterday that humanity is facing “collective suicide” at a meeting with ministers from 40 countries to discuss the climate crisis. “This has to be the decade of decisive climate action. That means trust, multilateralism and collaboration. We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide,” Guterres said. From the Earth Observation Program of the European Union, Copernicus, they also warn that the fire season in Europe has started in 2022 earlier than usual and with more intensity than in 2021, which stood out for being a year of catastrophic fires. all over the world. According to a UN report from February this year, man-made climate change and drought will cause the number of extreme forest fires to increase by 30% over the next 28 years.
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