By Michael Francis Gore, Charlie Devereux and Ana Cantero
VILLANUEVA DE LA SIERRA, Spain (Reuters) -Spain battled 14 major fires on Friday as authorities warned of “unfavourable conditions” to tackle flames that have already killed seven people and burned a surface area the same size as London.
A 12-day heatwave and southerly winds meant firefighters were facing another challenging day in one of the worst summers for fires in the past 20 years, said Virginia Barcones, director general of emergency services.
“In the western part of the country the situation is extremely worrying,” Barcones said on RTVE.
In Galicia, several fronts had joined together to form an even bigger blaze forcing the closure of highways and rail services to the region.
The fires in Ourense province in Galicia spread to the neighbouring province of Zamora. While many people were evacuated, some stayed behind to protect their homes.
“In the village some people have tractors and they have made a firewall in a flat area with fewer hills,” Loli Baz, a 52-year-old teacher in the village of Villanueva de la Sierra, told Reuters.
“We are waiting for the fire to come down to try and stop it, so it does not get to the houses in the village.”
Firefighters have been battling to put out wildfires across southern Europe, with the flames stoked by the extended heat wave gripping the region.
Spain’s national weather agency AEMET warned of extreme fire risk in the north and west of the country, as temperatures are expected to reach as high as 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on the north coast.
“Today will be another very difficult day, with an extreme risk of new fires,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez wrote on X.
FIRES SPREADING QUICKLY
A fire near Molezuelas de la Carballeda in the Castile and Leon region that was one of the largest in Spain’s history hadn’t advanced since Thursday, said Angel Sanchez, head of the region’s forest fire service.
“We will continue working to stabilise it,” he said.
The conditions are causing fires to spread at speeds that mean that firefighters can quickly lose control.
The Molezuelas fire at one stage was propagating at a rate of 4,000 hectares (15.4 square miles) per hour, national government representative for the Castile and Leon region Eduardo Diego told reporters, according to Europa Press.
A fire near Badajoz in the Extremadura region burned 2,500 hectares in a few hours before being brought under control, Jose Luis Quintana, the national government representative for the region, told RTVE.
“It was very fast with enormous growth, but it has been possible to tackle it,” Quintana said.
Avincis, the largest operator of emergency aerial services in Spain and Europe, said it had registered a 50% increase from last year in flight hours dedicated to firefighting operations in Spain and Portugal so far this season.
In Oimbra, Ourense, where three firefighters were seriously injured, a man was arrested for causing a fire by using his tractor when it was prohibited, police said.
Two people were arrested in Costa da Morte in Galicia for provoking fires by illegally burning copper cables to extract the metal and sell it, according to the Interior Ministry.
Wildfires this year have so far burned more than 157,000 hectares, almost double the annual average since 2006, according to the European Union’s Forest Fire Information Service.
(Reporting by Michale Gore, Charlie Devereux and Ana Cantero; Editing by Toby Chopra)
