Devastating fires hit France and Spain around the middle of this week. Due to large-scale evacuations, more than 200,000 people have already had to leave their homes. Although dozens of firefighters were injured during operations, no fatalities have been reported in either country so far.<\/p>\n
In France, authorities, according to the Interior Ministry, evacuated approximately 141,000 residents from the Gironde and Landes departments. Reuters also reported a full evacuation of the Cap Ferret peninsula near Bordeaux, from where people were leaving even by boat.<\/p>\n
French Interior Minister Laurent Nu\u0148ez said that fires in the southwest of the country alone burned roughly 14,000 hectares of vegetation.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, the evacuation of seven municipalities around Bordeaux was ordered. The measure affects residents of Saint-M\u00e9dard-en-Jalles, Le Haillan, Saint-Jean d’Illac, Martignas-sur-Jalles and Saint-Aubin de M\u00e9doc. The evacuation partly affected M\u00e9rignac and Eysines as well.<\/p>\n
„Given the spread of the fire and despite the significant resources deployed by the firefighting and rescue services, the situation requires the evacuation of the residents of the affected areas,“ said Sophie Brocasov\u00e1, the prefect of the Gironde department.<\/p>\n
Evacuations continue in Spain as well<\/p>\n
Massive evacuations are also underway in Spain. About 70,000 people had to leave the threatened areas.<\/p>\n
„We face difficult hours ahead, because even though temperatures have fallen, we don’t know exactly how the wind will behave and how strong it will be,“ said Spanish Prime Minister Pedro S\u00e1nchez.<\/p>\n
In Spain, fires west of Madrid burned up to 25,000 hectares, according to the country’s Interior Ministry.<\/p>\n
France reports a record year<\/p>\n
According to the French Interior Minister, fires since the start of the year have destroyed nearly 98,000 hectares of vegetation, which represents a new record and surpasses the previous maximum from 2022. For comparison, this is an area almost twice the size of Prague.<\/p>\n
July of this year is the worst July in France since measurements began in 2006.<\/p>\n
Czech firefighters also went to help<\/p>\n
France, because of the scale of the fires, asked its partners in the European Union for help. Therefore, on Friday the Czech Republic sent firefighters with a helicopter who are helping to protect the village of Le Temple.<\/p>\n
„The fires are spreading throughout its surroundings and the situation there is therefore quite dramatic. The helicopters on site are working in formation; three are deployed \u2014 besides our unit there is a Slovak aerial firefighting unit and one French. The helicopters take water from the freshwater lake Lacanau,“ the firefighters said.<\/p>\n
In addition to France and Spain, Italy, Greece and Scotland are also battling large fires. The flames have also affected Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria in North Africa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Devastating fires hit France and Spain around the middle of this week. Due to large-scale evacuations, more than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":158703,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[109,108,106,20065,178,3145,20066,16429,20,20064,20063,3305],"class_list":["post-158702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-evropa","tag-europa","tag-europe","tag-evropa","tag-kradeze","tag-krimi","tag-nehody","tag-pozary","tag-prepadeni","tag-zpravy","tag-zpravy-ceska-republika","tag-zpravy-z-okoli","tag-ztraty"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@cz\/116985212883899418","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/cz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}