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Fires in southwestern France and Spain continued to spread rapidly on Saturday, forcing thousands of people to evacuate their homes as scorching summer temperatures alarmed authorities in European countries.
About 14,000 people had been evacuated from France’s Gironde region by Saturday afternoon as more than 1,200 firefighters battled to bring the blaze under control, regional authorities said in a statement.
“The fires will continue to spread as long as they are not stabilized,” Vincent Ferrier, sub-prefect of Langon in the Gironde, told a news conference.
Fires have spread rapidly in recent weeks in France and other European countries, including Portugal and Spain, and more than 10,000 hectares of land burned in the Gironde region on Saturday, up from 7,300 hectares on Friday.
In the latest weather forecast, 38 of France’s 96 areas were included in the “orange” level of the “orange” alert. The heat wave in western France is expected to peak on Monday, with temperatures reaching over 40 degrees Celsius.
In neighboring Spain, firefighters were battling a series of blazes on Saturday after days of extremely hot temperatures that reached 45.7C.
The nearly week-long heat wave has caused 360 heat-related deaths, according to data from the Carlos III Health Institute.
More than 3,000 people have been evacuated from their homes due to a large fire near Mijas, a city in Malaga province that is popular with northern European tourists, the region’s emergency services said in a tweet early Saturday.
Many were sent to shelter in a regional sports center.
In Spain, plumes of thick black smoke covered the air near Casas de Miravetes in the Extremadura region, as helicopters dropped water on the blaze that has burned 3,000 hectares, forced the evacuation of two villages and threatens to reach the Monfrague national park.
Fires also continue to spread in the central region of Castile and León and Galicia in the north.
In Portugal, temperatures dropped across much of the country on Saturday after reaching around 40C in recent days.
A total of 39,550 hectares were destroyed by fires from the beginning of the year to mid-June, more than triple the area razed by fires in the same period last year, according to data from the Nature and Forestry Institute.
Portugal’s Health Ministry said 238 people had died as a result of the heat wave between July 7 and 13, most of them elderly and with pre-existing conditions.
In Britain, the national weather service has issued its first code red warning of “extreme heat” for parts of England on Monday and Tuesday.
The highest temperature ever recorded in Britain is 38.7 C, recorded in Cambridge on July 25, 2019./VOA
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