Hundreds of firefighters tackle major forest blaze west of Madrid
Madrid
Hundreds of firefighters and volunteers in Spain were battling a devastating forest fire to the west of Madrid for the second consecutive day on Wednesday. Strong winds were fuelling the flames in the province of Ávila, where large amounts of combustible undergrowth are found in often inadequately maintained forests.
Fire brigades are fighting another forest fire in Las Hurdes, in the Cáceres region. Around 200 people had to leave their homes as a precaution, Spanish media cited the police as saying.
Estimates based on data from the European Earth observation system Copernicus suggested that around 3,000 hectares of forest and bushland in the region of Cuevas del Valle in Ávila have already been affected by the flames, the newspaper El País reported. The fire broke out shortly before midnight on Monday in the mountainous region for initially unknown reasons.
According to media reports, arson cannot be ruled out. The fire broke out exactly 16 years to the day after the start of a major forest fire in the same region in 2009, and also in the late evening when firefighting planes cannot be deployed, in an area where there were neither country houses nor agricultural activities.
In addition to several fire brigades, the military emergency unit UME was deployed. More than 20 firefighting planes and helicopters dropped water over the fire sites.
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Qatar Tribune
5 days ago
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Hundreds of firefighters tackle major forest blaze west of Madrid
DPA Madrid Hundreds of firefighters and volunteers in Spain were battling a devastating forest fire to the west of Madrid for the second consecutive day on Wednesday. Strong winds were fuelling the flames in the province of Ávila, where large amounts of combustible undergrowth are found in often inadequately maintained forests. Fire brigades are fighting another forest fire in Las Hurdes, in the Cáceres region. Around 200 people had to leave their homes as a precaution, Spanish media cited the police as saying. Estimates based on data from the European Earth observation system Copernicus suggested that around 3,000 hectares of forest and bushland in the region of Cuevas del Valle in Ávila have already been affected by the flames, the newspaper El País reported. The fire broke out shortly before midnight on Monday in the mountainous region for initially unknown reasons. According to media reports, arson cannot be ruled out. The fire broke out exactly 16 years to the day after the start of a major forest fire in the same region in 2009, and also in the late evening when firefighting planes cannot be deployed, in an area where there were neither country houses nor agricultural activities. In addition to several fire brigades, the military emergency unit UME was deployed. More than 20 firefighting planes and helicopters dropped water over the fire sites.
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Speaking to reporters in Brussels, Teresa Ribera, an executive vice president of the European Commission, also ruled out sabotage. Nonetheless, the outage 'is one of the most serious episodes recorded in Europe in recent times', she said. For now, the Spanish government said it is waiting for more information on the cause of the blackout. State officials said they hope in the coming days to know what the cause was. Spain and Portugal were the worst affected, but outages occurred elsewhere too: By mid-afternoon on Monday, Spain's electricity operator, Red Electrica (REE), said it had started to recover voltage in the north, south and west of the country. The recovery process was carried out gradually to avoid overloading the grid as generators linked up. Power also returned to Portugal bit by bit. By Monday night, REN said 85 of its 89 power substations were back online. By Tuesday morning, power had almost fully returned to Spain and Portugal. At 6:30am (04:30 GMT) more than 99 percent of energy demand in Spain had been restored, REE said. Elsewhere, power was restored overnight to 6.2 million of Portugal's 6.5 million households. At the city level, Madrid's metro system said service was restored on all but one line by 8am (06:00 GMT), meaning that 80 percent of trains were operating during Tuesday morning's rush hour. While outages are not unheard of in Europe, the scale of Iberia's power failure was one of the largest in recent history. In 2019, England and Wales suffered regional blackouts amid lightning strikes at a gas-fired power plant in Bedfordshire and an offshore wind farm off the east coast of England. A 2006 German power overload caused outages as far away as Portugal and Morocco. In 2003, a problem with a hydroelectric power line between Italy and Switzerland caused an outage across Italy for about 12 hours. 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