As Spain grieves, recurrent heatwaves stir fears of more wildfires
After more than a dozen people died in recent forest fires, residents and experts try to prevent further tragedies. Madrid, Spain – Sally Chapman was
After more than a dozen people died in recent forest fires, residents and experts try to prevent further tragedies. Madrid, Spain – Sally Chapman was watching the Wimbledon tennis championship on television when she noticed a “commotion” outside their home in Bedar, a tiny village in southern Spain, so her husband went outside to investigate. So began what she remembers as the worst night of her life. It was July 9 and the forest fire that raged in Bedar and Los Gallardos, in Almeria, ultimately killed 14 people and saw more than 1,500 people evacuated. “There were five British people, friends of mine and others in the village, who died in the fire that night. Another close female friend is still fighting for her life in hospital,” she said. “It was probably the most terrifying thing that has ever happened. As we left [as evacuees], there were plumes of white smoke. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, our house is going to burn.'” On the night of the fire, when they reached the nearby village of Lubrin, they received an “amazing response” and were offered a bed in a woman’s house. The Almeria fire was among the deadliest blazes in Spain in recent years. As it spread, other forest fires threatened parts of France and Greece. Chapman returned home days later. “But what happens is there is a kind of survivor’s guilt,” the 62-year-old retired mediator told Al Jazeera. ‘This can’t happen again’ Bedar, a tiny village of just more than 1,000 residents, has one local police officer. Chapman said church bells were rung and neighbours warned them to leave.
A passing civil guard officer also told them to go the same way. “This tragedy will never be forgotten. The ninth of July was a dark day for Bedar. What could have gone wrong did go wrong,” she said. Chapman is part of a residents’ group campaigning to stop a repeat of this tragedy. “This can’t happen again. We are going to be pressing any political party to put in the protocols to stop this happening again,” she said. As wildfires have been tearing through forests across Europe, forcing residents to flee and filling the sky with smoke, Ferran Dalmau has been a front-line witness to the chaos they are wreaking across the continent. An expert firefighting analyst with the Spanish Ministry of Interior, Dalmau has been working with a small team to try to stop the flames destroying more homes and livelihoods and threatening lives. Though many of the blazes are starting to ease, there are concerns that intense heatwaves raise the risk of more fires. In southwest France’s Gironde region and the mountainous Var department, wildfires scorched tens of thousands of hectares before stabilising. Officials say the country’s largest blaze since 1949 is now under control but still not fully extinguished. In central Spain, fires that burned through tens of thousands of hectares near Madrid have been brought under control, allowing many evacuees to return home, even as crews battle flare-ups and new hotspots in provinces including Leon and Caceres. Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, and scientists warn that rising temperatures, prolonged drought and strong winds are turning southern Europe, especially France and Spain, into a far more flammable landscape, with the number of summer days featuring fire-prone conditions more than doubling since the early 1980s.
The BriefWire