Here are the main developments related to the wildfires raging in Spain and France on Saturday:<\/p>\n
More than 250,000 evacuated<\/p>\n
The wildfires have forced the evacuation of more than 250,000\u00a0people in total, authorities in both countries said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The French government said 197,000 people were evacuated because of wildfires near Bordeaux. The Spanish interior ministry said a total of 70,000 people were evacuated from villages west of Madrid.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Record area burnt in France<\/p>\n
Fires across France have burned nearly 98,000 hectares (242,163 acres), Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said, describing the total as a “historic record”.<\/p>\n
“There are still a number of fires across the country that have not yet been brought under control,” he said, singling out major blazes in the southwestern departments of Gironde and Landes.<\/p>\n
‘Save lives’: Sanchez<\/p>\n
The priority is “to save your lives and protect inhabited areas”, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told reporters while visiting a village in the fire zone.<\/p>\n
“We are going to have some complex hours ahead because although the temperatures have gone down, we do not know exactly how the wind will develop, how strong it will be.”<\/p>\n
25,000 hectares burned<\/p>\n
Wildfires raging west of Madrid have burned up to 25,000 hectares, more than twice the surface area of the city of Paris, the Spanish interior ministry said.<\/p>\n
Flames have ravaged nearly 10,000 hectares in the Madrid region and “between 13,000 and 15,000” in the neighbouring province of Avila, the ministry said in a message sent to journalists.<\/p>\n
Paris sends 100 firefighters<\/p>\n
Around 100 Paris firefighters were being deployed to southwest France to help battle raging wildfires, the head of the Paris Fire Brigade told AFP.<\/p>\n
Arnaud de Cacqueray, commander of the Paris Fire Brigade, said the firefighters would primarily be involved in wildfire suppression operations.<\/p>\n
A400M plane deployed<\/p>\n
French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu has ordered the armed forces to deploy an A400M military transport aircraft as early as Saturday to help combat fires raging in the southwest.<\/p>\n
The aircraft is to be equipped with a dispensing kit that can release 20 tonnes of fire retardant, equivalent to the capacity of two Dash firefighting aircraft.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Spain fire ‘decreased’<\/p>\n
The government delegation in Madrid said on X early Saturday that overnight conditions had “greatly aided the fight against the wildfires, which advanced little and decreased in intensity”.<\/p>\n
‘Real opportunity’<\/p>\n
With temperatures dipping around Madrid, “there is a real opportunity now to tackle this fire with some guarantee of success,” the central government’s delegate in the Spanish capital, Francisco Martin, told reporters late Friday.<\/p>\n
But he warned that Saturday would be “difficult” as “the wind is expected to rise in the morning, with rather erratic gusts”.<\/p>\n
Fire moves towards Bordeaux<\/p>\n
French authorities ordered the evacuation of towns near the southwestern city of Bordeaux “as a precaution”, as wildfires moved towards the area.<\/p>\n
The traffic information website Bison Fute urged drivers to avoid roads in the Gironde department, where Bordeaux is located, to free up access for emergency services.<\/p>\n
Major NASA site hit<\/p>\n
The massive wildfires forced NASA to evacuate one of its three global deep space communications facilities in Spain on Friday, impacting the agency’s ability to communicate with space probes.<\/p>\n
France sends troops<\/p>\n
Around 500 additional soldiers were being sent to support firefighters, bringing the total to 1,000, according to the French government following a crisis meeting late Friday.<\/p>\n
burs-rmb\/giv<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here are the main developments related to the wildfires raging in Spain and France on Saturday: More than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1110467,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5174],"tags":[63924,2000,299,5187,36,25543,5479,302835,302833,5338,104,302834],"class_list":["post-1110466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-eu","tag-bordeaux","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-france","tag-french-government","tag-madrid","tag-madrid-region","tag-paris-fire-brigade","tag-pedro-sanchez","tag-spain","tag-spanish-interior-ministry"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116980576921808475","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1110466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1110466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1110466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1110467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1110466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1110466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1110466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}