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LAYOUT: TWO DECKS ANG HEAD
LÈGE-CAP-FERRET, France — Luggage-clad residents and tourists fled a French peninsula by boat, and the smell of smoke drifted into parts of Madrid on Friday as wildfires swept through parts of southern Europe, triggering states of emergencies and calls for European Union help.In France, fires raging near the country’s prized wine country of Bordeaux forced hundreds of people to flee the Cap Ferret peninsula in the middle of the summer holiday season as the blaze devoured an area nearly twice the size of Manhattan.In Spain, several blazes were raging out of control within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of Madrid, with some residents of the Spanish capital waking up to the smell of smoke.Thick acrid smoke bellowed into the sky as the wall of fire crept along parched Earth, according to images from Spanish authorities from aircraft flying over the destruction.Fanned by wind and scorching temperatures topping 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in some areas, the blazes have killed at least three firefighters and forced the evacuation of some 50,000 people in the two countries.“The smoke was incredibly thick. You couldn’t breathe,” Jose Cobos, who fled his home some 50 km southwest of Madrid with his wife and three dogs, told Antena 3 television.The total area of land burnt so far this year in EU countries is the second-largest on record, according to satellite data from the European Forest Fire Information System, or Effis.French authorities have ordered thousands of tourists on the southwestern Atlantic coast out of campsites and holiday homes, as firefighters backed by water-bombing planes raced to control the blazes.More than 40,000 people have been evacuated in the region so far.EU helpBoth France and Spain have appealed to the EU for help, with Madrid requesting four specialized planes on Friday, a day after Paris asked Brussels for more resources.“We are living through a dramatic situation, not only in various Spanish provinces but also in regions of neighboring countries,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez wrote on X, saying the government “has deployed all available resources.”The Spanish government declared a state of emergency in the Madrid region, where more than 10,000 people have been evacuated in recent days.“Meteorological conditions, fundamentally the wind, will complicate firefighting operations this Friday,” the Madrid regional government said in a post on X.France’s southeast was also being hard hit, with Interior Minister Laurent Nunez saying 32 fires of various intensity were raging across the country.“We have passed the threshold of 50,000 hectares that have burnt since January 1 of this year,” an area nearly five times the size of Paris, said Nunez, adding that the figure was nearly three times that of last year.Spreading flamesIn Italy, thousands of emergency workers battled scores of fires in Sicily and in the Calabria region, where a local official said arsonists had started fires by tying rags soaked in flammable liquid to the tails of stray cats to spread the flames.One firefighter died after falling ill while battling the flames in Sicily, the interior minister said.Two firefighters died on Tuesday tackling another blaze near Bordeaux’s airport.
Source: Manilatimes
