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Madrid (AFP) – A new forest fire in Spain, a country afflicted by a pronounced drought, advanced this Friday without control in the region of Extremadura (west), where it had burned more than 3,000 hectares and forced the evacuation of 700 people, the authorities reported.
The fire, which started Wednesday night near the municipality of Pinofranqueado, led authorities to evacuate 700 people from several surrounding towns, the Interior Ministry said Friday at noon on Twitter.
The flames, which spread rapidly due to the strong winds in the area, had burned 3,000 hectares, and the situation has gotten worse because “the wind has not stopped at any time,” the regional president of Extremadura, Guillermo Fernández, told reporters. Stick.
“Right now it is not a problem of material and human resources, it is a problem of winds, which is making it extremely difficult for the fire to be controlled,” said Fernández Vara from the outpost of the authorities seeking to put out the flames. .
Due to the severity of the fire, some 165 soldiers from the Military Emergency Unit (UME), specialized in disaster response, joined the extinguishing work.
In total, on Friday afternoon some 400 people were fighting the flames, supported by 14 aerial means that dumped water on the flames, which affect the regions of Las Hurdes and Sierra de Gata, the Ministry of Agriculture of the government of Extremadura reported on Twitter. .
The president of the government, Pedro Sánchez, who on Thursday night had tweeted that he was following “very closely the evolution of the fire”, canceled this Friday his participation in a rally in Extremadura, in the middle of the campaign for the regional elections on May 28.
According to the government of Extremadura, the fire would have been intentional.
Fernández Vara lamented that there are “bastards who are capable of setting” fires that cause “irreversible damage that then takes dozens and dozens of years to recover, if they ever recover.”
When summer has not yet arrived, a favorable time for forest fires, Spain has already suffered several, after being the most affected country in Europe in 2022, with almost 500 fires that devoured more than 300,000 hectares, according to the European System of Information on Forest Fires (EFFIS).
A European country on the front line in the face of climate change, Spain has experienced a multiplication of heat waves for several years, with increasingly scarce and irregular rainfall.
The first quarter of this year has been the “driest” since records began in 1961, according to the State Meteorological Agency.
In addition to the pronounced lack of rainfall, a very early wave of extreme temperatures was added at the end of April, which left the absolute record for a month of April in mainland Spain at 38.8 ºC, a level more typical of summer months such as July or August. .
