Europe, Asia and North America are still suffering from extreme heat on Wednesday in several regions, sometimes plagued by violent forest fires such as in Greece, where hundreds of firefighters have engaged in “a huge battle” against the flames.
From California to China, authorities have warned of the health dangers of these temperatures, urging people to drink water and take shelter from the sun.
In Europe too, several regions have been placed on red alert due to the “extreme danger” induced by these temperatures.
Hundreds of firefighters are fighting fires in the Canary archipelago and especially in Greece where, for the third consecutive day, “a huge battle” against the flames is being waged west of Athens and on the tourist island of Rhodes, according to the Minister for Climate Crisis and Civil Protection, Vassilis Kikilias.
Strong winds of up to 60 km / h blowing over part of the country are fanning the fires and a new wave of heatwave is expected there from Thursday, with temperatures which could reach 44 ° C on Friday and Saturday.
230 firefighters from Romania, Slovakia and Poland will be sent as reinforcements to the country by Friday as part of European mutual aid, announced Yannis Artopios, spokesperson for the Greek fire services.
According to the Romanian government, 40 firefighters from that country are already in Greece and 40 more will join them.
Despite evacuation orders in some localities, some residents refused to leave their homes.
” I do not go. I started building this house when I was 27. I will stay here at least to watch it burn,” Dimitris Michaelous told AFPTV in the town of Pournari, northwest of Athens.
The “Charon” heat wave
After Cerberusis the heat wave Charonnamed after the smuggler of the Underworld, which envelops the northern Mediterranean coast.
In the south of France, records have been broken, mainly at altitude in the Alps (east), the Pyrenees (west) and the island of Corsica, the meteorological services announced. These records are 8°C to 11.9°C above normal for the season.
In Spain, “you can’t be on the street, it’s horrible, horrible, horrible”, lamented Lidia Rodriguez, 29, in Madrid. “As I am from Seville, I am used to the heat, but there, we are suffocating,” testified the vacationer to AFP.
According to the Spanish Meteorological Agency (Aemet), temperatures reached 45.3 ° C on Tuesday in Figueres, Catalonia (northeast), and 43.7 ° C in the Balearic Islands.
And the sea temperature reached a record level for the season on the Spanish coast, with an average of 24.6°C recorded by the sea, 2.2°C higher than the normal for the season and significantly higher. than the previous records of 2015 (24°C) and 2022 (23.7°C).
In Italy, 20 cities are placed on red alert.
In Rome, the mercury reached 40°C, just below the local record of 40.5°C from August 2007.
Early Tuesday afternoon, the highest temperature recorded in Italy, which holds the heat record in Europe with 48.8 ° C measured in Sicily on August 11, 2021, was 44 ° C in Ragusa, in this same Mediterranean island.
“In Naples, with the suitcases you can do ten minutes after you are dead,” assured AFP Erica Levler, 24, a Roman student on vacation in this city in the south of the Boot. “It’s a little better here, because there’s the sea; in Rome there is no sea,” she added.
Temperature records were similarly broken around the world on Tuesday.