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A firefighting plane drops fire retardant as it flies over a wildfire in Ille-sur-Tet near Perpignan (Reuters)<\/p>\nYour support helps us to tell the story<\/p>\n
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A firefighter has died \u200bwhile battling a blaze in the Savoie region in the French Alps, the French interior minister said on Wednesday. <\/p>\n
Wildfires have raged across \u2060southern Europe since last week and in France have forced thousands to leave their homes. The European Commission has pre-positioned a record 777 firefighters from 14 European countries in high-risk areas across Cyprus, Greece, Italy, France, Spain and Portugal.<\/p>\n
Heatwaves in France and across western Europe in May and June have parched \u200cvast areas of land, making \u200cthem particularly vulnerable to wildfires this year.<\/p>\n
“It was with deep sadness that I learnt this morning of the \u2060death of a young \u200bvolunteer \u2060firefighter from SDIS 73, aged 22, who died whilst on duty after spending \u2060part of the night fighting a forest fire \u200bin \u2060Savoie,” Interior Minister Laurent Nunez \u200csaid on X.<\/p>\n
It comes as temperatures are forecast to once again hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in \u2060southwest France this week.<\/p>\n
Portugal and France activated the EU Civil Protection Mechanism over the weekend \u200cdue to wildfires burning simultaneously and scorching \u200bthousands of hectares.<\/p>\n
A firefighting plane drops fire retardant as it flies over a wildfire in Ille-sur-Tet near Perpignan (Reuters)<\/p>\n
The Trevillach wildfire \u200cin France’s Pyrenees-Orientales has burned \u20604,900 hectares (12,108 acres).<\/p>\n
Earlier this week a wildfire burning out of control in southern France forced the evacuation of over 10,000 people from two dozen small towns and villages near the Spanish border. <\/p>\n
The blaze has injured 16 people, including \u2060four firefighters, and scorched some 4,600 hectares (11,367 acres) in \u200bthe \u2060foothills of the French Pyrenees, local prefect Pierre Regnault de la Mothe said in a post on X. The Trevillach \u2060blaze was burning near the third \u200cstage of the Tour de France, leading to its closure to the public on Monday to allow firefighters easy access to the area, according to Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme. The \u200cmotorcade of vehicles that follows the race was also \u200ckept to a minimum, he said. The stage, which is 196 km (122 miles) long, began in the Spanish city of Granollers and ends in Les Angles, in the Pyrenees-Orientales region of France.<\/p>\n
Europe is warming at more than twice the \u2060global average, the World Meteorological Organization has said, making prolonged heat episodes increasingly likely. Temperatures are forecast to once again hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in southwest France this week, with Portugal and Spain also baking under another heatwave, but are unlikely to reach the record highs seen in June. On the Spanish side of the border, the fire ravaged 2,200 ha \u2014 97% of them in the protected natural area of Les Gavarres \u2014 although regional authorities said over the weekend that \u200cit was stable and would be completely extinguished during the week.<\/p>\n
Police have arrested an \u200bemployee of a company contracted by Catalonia’s regional government who is suspected of \u200chaving sparked the wildfire by using an angle \u2060grinder at the side of a road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[16],"tags":[12813,50,19053,20820],"class_list":["post-99696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-alps","tag-accidents","tag-alps","tag-disasters","tag-natural-catastrophes"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116883590159122800","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}