(Bordeaux) After Spain and Portugal already in the midst of a heat wave, France in turn plunged into a second heat wave on Wednesday in barely a month, with its corollary: forest fires in the south of the country.
Posted at 6:44 a.m.
Two fires, which caused the evacuation of 6,000 campers, had already ravaged nearly 1,700 hectares of pines on Wednesday morning in Gironde, in the south-west where seven departments were placed on heat wave orange vigilance.
Spain was almost all on alert – red in Andalusia (south), Extremadura (southwest) and Galicia (northwest) – while “suffocating” temperatures are expected in the whole country, up to 44 degrees locally, according to Aemet, the national meteorological agency.
The heat wave started there last weekend and is expected to last at least until Sunday. 43.5°C have already been recorded in Ribadavia (Galicia, north-west) and 43.9 in Mérida (south-east).
In Portugal, a fire overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday killed one person in the region of Aveiro (north), according to the emergency services, which have been strongly mobilized for several days. The center of the country, which has been in flames since Thursday, remains the most affected by the forest fires which flared up again on Tuesday afternoon, fanned by the heat and the force of the wind.
Wednesday morning, four major outbreaks mobilized more than 1,500 firefighters in the municipalities of Leiria, Pombal and Ourém, located at the confluence of the districts of Leiria and Santarém, just over a hundred kilometers from Lisbon.
Drought and heat waves favoring these disasters are a direct consequence of climate change according to scientists, with greenhouse gas emissions increasing in intensity, duration and frequency.
Clare Nullis, spokesperson for the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, has warned in recent days of a critical situation of “very, very dry soils” and the impact of temperatures on the glaciers of the Alps. “It’s a very bad season for the glaciers”, she insisted, a little more than a week after the collapse in Italy on July 3 of a huge block of the Marmolada glacier, weakened by the global warming, which killed eleven people.
35°, new “standard”
Like the Iberian Peninsula, France has been facing – since Monday – a heat wave for the second time in a month, an illustration of this climate change which will cause summers “increasingly hot, where 35 degrees will be the norm” , according to Météo-France
Two fires, fueled “by dry vegetation, in particular undergrowth” according to the prefecture, have ravaged since Tuesday afternoon 1,700 hectares of pines in the Bordeaux region (south-west).
The most important destroyed 1000 hectares of pines near Landiras, about forty kilometers from Bordeaux, according to the prefecture.
And near the tourist site of the Dune du Pilat, the highest in Europe, located on the Bassin d’Arcachon, some 6,000 campers were evacuated as a preventive measure overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday due to another fire, which consumed some 700 hectares of old pines, according to a fire official.
According to the firefighters, it was “not at all fixed” on Wednesday.
The episode of high heat should last in France at least until the beginning of next week. Météo France expects an episode lasting “eight to ten days”, with a peak probably “between Saturday and Tuesday” July 19. From Wednesday, the maximum could be between 36 and 38 degrees and even up to 39 degrees in the Southwest.
The high temperatures are then expected to spread to other parts of western or central Europe.
In the United Kingdom, the weather agency (Met Office) issued an orange alert before a wave of “extreme heat” from Sunday with temperatures that could exceed 35 degrees.
The British have also been called upon by their water companies to save every drop, in particular by heating only the quantity strictly necessary for their cup of tea.