French firefighters said Thursday they were hoping to halt the country’s biggest wildfire this summer that has left one person dead and destroyed several thousand hectares of land and dozens of homes in the south.
With Europe facing new August heatwaves as concerns grow over the impact of global warming, many areas are on alert for wildfires.
Regional authorities in Spain said late Wednesday that a wildfire near the Mediterranean tourist town of Tarifa that prompted evacuations had been stabilised.
Around 2,000 firefighters were still mobilised Thursday in France’s southern Aude department to contain the blaze that started Tuesday. Thirteen people have been injured, two of them seriously.
‘The objective is to stabilise the fire’ and halt its progress by the end of the day, said Christophe Magny, chief of the Aude department’s firefighter unit.
‘This is a decisive day for the turnaround,’ said Captain Jean-Marie Aversinq, spokesman for France’s national SDIS fire services. ‘The next step will be the flooding and treatment’ of the vast area affected.
The fire advanced much more slowly overnight to Thursday than at the start, when it engulfed around 1,000 hectares per hour, according to the authorities in the nearby city of Narbonne.
Weather conditions had become more favourable after two days of strong and changing winds that made the blaze’s progress difficult to predict.
Firefighters warned that stronger winds were forecast for later Thursday, when local temperatures were set to reach 32 degrees Celsius.
‘We have to remain cautious,’ Magny said.
A 65-year-old woman, who had refused to evacuate, was found dead in her scorched house, while 13 people were injured, 11 of them firefighters.
The wildfire is a ‘catastrophe on an unprecedented scale’, prime minister Francois Bayrou said Wednesday during a visit to the affected region.
‘What is happening today is linked to global warming and linked to drought,’ Bayrou said.
The blaze has burned around 17,000 hectares of land.
Around 3,000 homes were still threatened by the fire Thursday, firefighters said, while around 1,000 people who had been evacuated in the area were not yet cleared to return home.
In Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse, the village hardest hit by the fire, thick smoke rose Thursday from the pine hills overlooking the vineyards where dry grass was ablaze, an AFP journalist said.
