Violent winds and high temperatures again make it very difficult at dawn on Sunday for firefighters on the tourist island of Tenerife, in the Spanish archipelago of the Canaries, to face the worst forest fire in the history of the region.
“It’s a devastating fire, a fire on a completely different scale, a scale that the Canary Islands had never known before,” said the head of government of Tenerife, Rosa Davila.
The fire, with a perimeter of 70 km, has so far ravaged 8,400 hectares, 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.
“Last night was very complicated and tonight will probably be just as complicated, if not worse,” Clavijo said on Saturday night.
Strong gusts of wind and higher than expected temperatures had already facilitated during the night from Friday to Saturday the spread of the fire which broke out Tuesday evening in a mountainous part of the northeast of the island.
“Tonight the work will be very difficult, but vital to contain the fire,” he said.
In the northern town of La Matanza de Acentejo, Candelaria Bencomo Betancor, a farmer in her 70s, gazes with anguish at the smoke coming from the mountains.
“The fire is close to our farm, we have carts, vans, chickens, all that … it’s a good business but if the fire happens, we will be totally ruined”, confides- she, on the verge of tears, at AFPTV. “They have to do something because the fire is right there”.
Another resident, Maria del Pilar Rodriguez Padron, is sleeping in her car near her house. “They offered us a place to go but we prefer to stay in the car to watch the house and see if it is burning or not. Being somewhere else we just couldn’t sleep.”
The fire has so far affected eleven municipalities on the island of Tenerife, the largest of the Canaries, which covers a total of 203,400 hectares.
The island has seen larger fires in terms of area burned, particularly in 2007, but the weather conditions and topography of this one made Mr Clavijo say on Thursday that the archipelago was facing its “most complicated” for 40 years.
The head of the forest services, Pedro Martinez, spoke on Saturday of an inferno “behaving like a sixth generation forest fire”, in reference to its size.
“The fire is beyond our ability to put it out, maybe not in all areas, but in a large part of them,” Martinez continued.
Before Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez came to Tenerife on Monday, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska went there on Saturday and assured that all state resources were mobilized for the island in order to control “this very serious emergency”.
The fire generated a large cloud of smoke eight kilometers high, visible on satellite images, which exceeded the summit of Teide, a volcano overlooking the island and the highest point in Spain with its 3,715 meters above sea level.
This fire occurs between two heat waves on the island which has many dry areas, which increases the risk of fires.
Experts say extreme weather events have intensified due to global warming. Heat waves are therefore likely to be more frequent and intense, and their impact more widespread.
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). Nearly 76,000 hectares have already burned in 2023 in this country, on the front line in the face of global warming.
08/20/2023 04:40:02 – La Orotava (Spain) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
