Wildfires claim third life in Spain as intense heat continues across Europe
A volunteer firefighter died after battling a blaze in Castile and León, authorities said on Thursday, after the death of a fellow volunteer in the same region on Tuesday. A man died on the outskirts of Madrid on Monday as he tried to save horses from a burning stable.
'Death strikes us again with the loss of a second volunteer who has lost their life in León,' Spain's prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said on Thursday. He thanked the 'heroes' protecting people from fires and said 'the threat remains extreme'.
In Patras, Greece's third-largest city, firefighters pushed back a wildfire that had burned through the outskirts of the port and forced the evacuation of a children's hospital and a retirement home. Local media reported that a 19-year-old man who had allegedly confessed to starting the blaze was among a number of arrests made in connection to it.
The Greek fire service spokesperson, Vasilios Vathrakoyannis, said the general situation had improved on all fronts after an all-night battle, but that a very high fire risk was still predicted for most areas of the country.
'Today is expected to be a very difficult day,' he said.
Spain has become the fifth country in a week to activate the EU's civil protection mechanism to fight the fires. The European Commission announced that two planes stationed in France were expected to be deployed in Spain on Thursday.
Greece is expected to receive two Swedish helicopters stationed in Bulgaria under the mechanism, which it activated on Tuesday, while Bulgaria, Albania and Montenegro – where a soldier died fighting a fire near the capital – have also received support from firefighters from several EU countries.
The EU's civil protection mechanism, which coordinates responses during wars and other crises, has been activated 16 times during the current fire season. The number of activations is 2025 is already as the figure for the whole of the 2024 fire season, the commission said.
Wildfires have burned more than 400,000 hectares in Europe so far this year, an increase of 87% compared with the average over the past two decades. France experienced its largest wildfire since 1949 last week.
The two Spanish firefighters who died were using brush cutters to slow the spread of a fire when they were engulfed by the flames on Tuesday afternoon, according to the Spanish daily El País. The fire is poised to become one of the largest in the country's history.
Strong and variable winds spread flames that trapped the two men, the newspaper reported. One man died within a few hours, while the other, who suffered 85% burns, died after a day in hospital.
Six people remain in hospital in the region with burns and serious injuries, local media reported.
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The deadly fires come as southern Europe suffers intense heat that has broken temperature records across the continent – made worse by fossil fuel pollution that traps sunlight and heats the planet – and which has dried out vegetation.
'It's obvious that climate change is exacerbating the severity of fires,' said Eduardo Rojas Briales, a forestry researcher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia and former deputy director general of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. 'But it's not responsible to wait for greenhouse gas emissions to drop … as the sole approach to addressing the problem.'
He called for additional policies such as ensuring dead plant material is kept at manageable levels, creating gaps in vegetation, for instance through reversing rural abandonment, and using prescribed burning.
'There is no alternative but to build landscapes … that are truly resilient to fires,' he said.
A report published Thursday by XDI, a climate risk analysis group, found that the climate crisis has doubled the risk of infrastructure damage from forest fires in France, Italy, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria since 1990. It predicted risk would increase further still in future.
'We're all asking ourselves, how much worse can it get?,' said Karl Mallon, XDI's head of science and technology. 'According to our latest analysis, a lot.'
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