A forecast of an incoming heat wave across France and Spain this week is threatening to hamper firefighting efforts as some of Europe’s worst wildfires in decades rage on.
France’s weather service forecast temperatures of up to 40 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) from Tuesday, while Spain’s Aemet warned of a new heat wave from Wednesday till the end of the week, with highs of 42 degree Celsius in the northeast and 39 degrees Celsius in central regions.
Authorities said soaring temperatures, dry winds and low humidity would push wildfire danger to “extreme” levels, even as forests turned tinder-dry by successive heat waves this year.
Thousands of firefighters and water-dropping aircraft raced to contain the blazes before temperatures rise further.
Experts linked the scale of the fires to increasingly frequent and intense heat waves driven by climate change, as hotter and drier conditions are making wildfires more destructive.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron said one fire in the Landes region had been contained, but a much larger wildfire near Bordeaux continued to burn after scorching about 42,000 hectares, forcing around 220,000 people to evacuate and destroying hundreds of homes.
“The weeks ahead will be hard. We must hold firm,” Macron said.
Overnight on Tuesday, firefighters prevented a massive wildfire along the Atlantic coast west of Bordeaux from spreading, authorities said.
According to officials, 93 firefighters have been injured since the operation began.
Aid from Germany arrived in the region on Monday in the form of two transport helicopters and an A400M transport aircraft carrying equipment.
In Spain, wildfires west of Madrid and in other regions have forced about 60,000 people to flee.
With the coming heat wave threatening to fuel further spread of the wildfires, Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska firefighters in Spain made progress after a “positive night” against wildfires to the west of Madrid.
“It has been a reasonably positive night, thanks to the tremendous effort of all the public emergency services,” Grande-Marlaska said. “We are in critical hours.”
Some 150,000 hectares of land have burned in Spain and 115,000 hectares in France since the start of this year.
At a campsite near Navaluenga, west of the capital, ravaged by Spain’s worst wildfire on record, the site co-owner Maria Angeles Canete said her family lost everything.
“We had this campsite, we had another one, and we’ve lost it all. We have nothing,” she told the AFP news agency.
The European Union deployed additional firefighting aircraft to France, while EU commissioner Hadja Lahbib warned that resources are under growing strain as extreme fire conditions spread across southern and central Europe.
“Extreme conditions are looming for Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, in addition to France, the Iberian Peninsula... where the situation is expected to worsen, including in Portugal starting today,” Lahbib said.
In Italy, a wildfire in the southern Puglia region forced the evacuation of hundreds of tourists from beaches and campgrounds, authorities said.