France and Spain battled raging wildfires on Saturday that have forced more than 250,000 people to flee their homes this week, killed at least one person, and prompted France to deploy a military cargo plane and slash the final stage of the Tour de France to free up security personnel for the fight.
In France, a French Air Force A400M transport aircraft dropped tons of flame retardant over drought-parched woodland in the southwest, where authorities feared flames could spread toward the wine-producing city of Bordeaux. French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said close to 242,000 acres had burned nationwide, calling it a “historic record” — an area he said was nearly ten times the size of Paris. Roughly 197,000 people have been evacuated in France so far, in what Nunez described as probably the largest peacetime evacuation the country has experienced.
In Spain, one person died in the town of Manises, local authorities said, the first fatality reported from this week’s fires. Around 70,000 people were evacuated from areas near Madrid, where thick ash coated rooftops and residents were told to keep windows shut against irritating smoke. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, visiting a command post west of the capital, said the immediate priority was to save lives while warning of a difficult fight ahead, and his government declared a national emergency. Spain has now lost roughly 130,000 hectares of forest to fire so far this year, well above its recent ten-year annual average of about 100,000 hectares, Sánchez said.
Spain deployed some 2,600 firefighters, police and other emergency personnel to two major blazes west of Madrid, backed by 19 water-dropping aircraft and helicopters. France sent 1,400 firefighters to the fire burning in the Gironde region near Bordeaux, plus hundreds more to a separate blaze further south in the Landes region. Dozens of firefighters have been injured on both sides of the border, authorities said, as police went door to door in threatened towns and residents fled by car amid scenes of panic.
Race organizers and Paris police announced a shortened, 21st and final stage of the Tour de France on Sunday, redirecting security personnel toward the firefighting effort — a rare disruption to France’s marquee annual sporting event.
Scientists point to an unusually early and severe run of heat waves as the driver behind this year’s fires. A sharp drop in rainfall across France and Spain beginning in May, arriving at the same time as record-hot temperatures, produced what climatologists call a “flash drought” — a rapid drying of soil moisture that primed forests and scrubland to burn. Researchers say climate change has measurably increased the frequency and severity of such flash droughts across Europe, which is warming faster than any other continent. The total area burned across the European Union so far this year is the second-largest on record, according to satellite monitoring data.
