2023-08-20 10:39:00
Canary Islands: a fire of “never known” magnitude
The worst forest fire in the region’s history. The tourist island of Tenerife, in the Spanish archipelago of the Canaries, is facing “a devastating fire, of a completely different scale, which the Canary Islands had never known before”, lamented the head of government. of Tenerife, Rosa Davila. Violent winds and high temperatures again make the task of firefighters very difficult this Sunday, August 20 at dawn.
The fire, with a perimeter of 70 kilometers, has so far ravaged 8,400 hectares, or more than 4% of the total surface of Tenerife. On Saturday evening, the president of the Canary Islands regional government, Fernando Clavijo, indicated that “a total of 12,279 people” have been evacuated so far, citing figures from the Guardia Civil.
A few hours earlier, the emergency services had reported on the social network X (ex-Twitter) of “provisional estimates suggesting that more than 26,000 people have been evacuated”. Regional authorities, who had relayed this figure, explained that it was “based on census figures” of areas subject to evacuation orders.
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Greece: eight villages evacuated in the Northeast
Eight villages were evacuated in northeastern Greece on Saturday August 19, and the fire is moving towards the airport in the port city of Alexandroupolis, authorities said. “At least eight villages have been evacuated and we are doing everything we can to ensure that people’s lives are not in danger,” Christos Metios, governor of East Macedonia and Thrace, told Athens News.
Authorities have asked residents of the port city of Alexandroupolis to stay home. “We have a difficult night in prospect and gusts of 7 to 8 on the Beaufort scale”, ranging from 0 to 12, argued a spokesperson for the firefighters to the Skai TV channel.
Houses burned in the morning in the villages of Aetohori and Pefkax, according to firefighters quoted by the Athens News agency. The fire is very close to the villages of Agnantia and Anthia and is moving north towards Alexandroupolis airport, according to firefighters. Airport authorities are on alert because of the thick smoke which is causing visibility problems, according to the same source.
Three coastguard vessels, aided by private vessels, are also on alert in the port of Alexandroupolis, authorities said. And three additional coast guard ships are heading to the area, they said. A total of 31 fire engines, 9 fire brigades on foot, 14 planes and 4 helicopters, supported on the ground by volunteers, are fighting the fire in this area, according to the authorities.
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Canada: “A matter of life or death”
About 30,000 people have been ordered to evacuate, and another 36,000 are on high alert and ready to flee. Authorities in British Columbia, in western Canada, urged tens of thousands of residents to take evacuation orders seriously on Saturday in the face of “extreme and rapidly evolving” wildfires. These fires threaten large parts of the scenic Okanagan Valley, including the city of Kelowna. The blaze, resulting from a merger of two fires, located in the Shuswap region 500 km northeast of Vancouver, now covers more than 41,000 hectares, according to firefighters in British Columbia.
The situation in this area popular with boaters and hikers is changing very quickly, said Bowinn Ma, emergency manager for the western province of British Columbia.
“It’s a matter of life and death for the people who are in these properties, but also for the relief workers who are sometimes forced to come back and ask people to leave,” she said during the interview. a press conference. Kelowna, a city of 150,000 people, suffocated by thick smoke, is the latest urban center to fall victim to the dramatic wildfires across Canada, where millions of hectares have burned.
Canada has been confronted in recent years with extreme weather events, the intensity and frequency of which have been increased by climate change. The country is thus experiencing a record-breaking forest fire season this year: 14 million hectares – about the size of Greece – have burned, double the last record dating from 1989.
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