In the Canary Islands, firefighters face the “most complicated” fire of the last 40 years

2023-08-17 23:59:43

It is a fierce fight in which the firefighters are engaged. The fire that has already ravaged more than 3,200 hectares on the Spanish island of Tenerife is “probably the most complicated” in recent decades on the Canary archipelago, located off the west coast of Africa, said Thursday the president of the regional government.

The fire, which broke out on Tuesday evening, is raging in a wooded area and ravines in the northeast part of the island. More than 3,200 hectares have burned, according to the latest report from the authorities.

The government decreed Thursday morning the confinement of the locality of La Esperanza, in the municipality of Rosario, while a dozen small villages or hamlets in this tourist area were evacuated as a precaution. Some 3,000 people were evacuated, around 4,000 asked to stay in their homes to avoid the fumes.

Extreme heat that complicates the task

“The night was very hard (…) This fire is probably the most complicated that we have had in the Canaries (…) at least in the last 40 years”, declared the president of the government of the archipelago, Fernando Clavijo, at a press conference in Tenerife. “Extreme heat and weather circumstances (…) complicate the work of firefighters,” he added.

More than 250 people, as well as 17 aircraft, are mobilized against the flames. The Military Emergency Unit (UME), which regularly intervenes alongside the firefighters to fight the most voracious fires or the most dangerous for the population, has been mobilized. “A new UME detachment should arrive in the afternoon,” added Fernando Clavijo, which will bring the number of soldiers mobilized on this fire to more than 200, according to the Ministry of Defence.

“We are facing a fire like we have never seen in the Canary Islands,” said meteorologist Vicky Palma during this press conference, referring to a record column of smoke and a continuous duration of the flames of 34 hours.

Closed roads

Local authorities have closed the roads leading to the mountains in the northeast of the island. “We ask the population to respect all these roadblocks,” the head of the archipelago’s civil protection department, Montserrat Román, said on Wednesday.

The blaze comes after a heatwave that swept across the Canary Islands left many areas dry there and increased the risk of wildfires. In 2022, 300,000 hectares were destroyed by more than 500 fires in Spain, a record in Europe, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis). More than 71,000 hectares have already burned in 2023 in this country.

According to scientists, extreme weather events have intensified due to global warming. Heat waves are likely to be more frequent and intense and their impact more widespread.