Wildfire near Marseille suspends flights, prompts stay-at-home orders
The prefecture urged people in the affected areas to stay indoors and off the roads. With the fire approaching Marseille, the prefecture also advised residents in the northern area of the city to remain inside with doors and windows closed to prevent toxic smoke from entering their homes.
Live TV footage showed light smoke giving the sky over Marseille's old port a dusty aspect.
Some 168 firefighters, two helicopters and 68 engines were deployed to tackle the fire, which broke out near the town of Les Pennes-Mirabeau, with 350 hectares (865 acres) hit.
There have been no reports of casualties.
Marseille airport announced that the runway had been closed at around midday
Several weeks of heat waves combined with strong winds have increased the risk of wildfires in southern France, with several breaking out over the past couple of days.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘Unlike any other kind of fear': wildfires leave their mark across Spain
On Saturday, the people of Paüls will celebrate the feast of their patron saint, Sant Roc, with a mass, followed by a communal meal eaten at stone tables, jota folk dances and a profound and lingering sense of relief. Last month's wildfire – which turned the night skies a hellish orange, blackened the surrounding hills and devoured 3,300 hectares (8,154 acres) of land – was a near-disaster that stirred memories of the 2009 blaze in nearby Horta de Sant Joan that killed five firefighters. 'People were afraid that everything would burn and that they'd lose everything,' says Enric Adell, the mayor of the small Catalan mountain town. 'They were scared of getting trapped and not being able to get out of the village.' The fear of a fire like that, he adds, is unlike any other kind of fear. 'We've been through a pandemic and a nationwide power cut and torrential rains, but a fire on this scale was something else – as was the aftermath,' says Adell. In the hills above the village square, the charred trees are a reminder of what could have happened without the bravery of hundreds of firefighters, one of whom, Antonio Serrano, lost his life. Changing winds and sheer luck also played a part. 'When a fire hits,' says the mayor, 'it really leaves its mark.' This summer's fires have already left their mark across the length and breadth of Spain, from Galicia and Castilla y León in the north-west to Catalonia in the north-east, from the smart suburbs outside Madrid to Extremadura in the south-west, and all the way down to the beaches of Tarifa in Andalucía. As well as panic and the increasingly familiar tang of smoke, this year's fires have brought with them a sense of deja vu. The hot, deadly summer of 2022 yielded images that laid bare Spain's huge vulnerability as the effects of the climate emergency became increasingly plain. Footage that went around the world that July showed Ángel Martín, a 53-year-old man from Tábara in Castilla y León, using one of his excavators to try to stop the fires in the Sierra de la Culebra reaching the town. In the video, the machine is engulfed by the flames before Martín runs out of the inferno, the clothes burning off his frame. Martín, a much-loved figure in Tábara, suffered burns to 80% of his body and died in hospital three months later. Three years on, Spain is once again on the defensive. 'The fires are one of the parts of the impact of that climate change, which is why we have to do all we can when it comes to prevention,' the country's environment minister, Sara Aagesen, told Cadena Ser radio this week. 'Our country is especially vulnerable to climate change. We have resources now but, given that the scientific evidence and the general expectation point to it having an ever greater impact, we need to work to reinforce and professionalise those resources.' As politicians engage in blame games, experts warn, once again, that all the bickering over the number of water-dumping planes misses the point. The current spate of fires, they add, was entirely predictable and underlines the need for a fundamental rethink of land use and management in a continent that is on the frontline of the climate emergency. 'This year's fires are basically on the same level as those we saw in 2022 and 2023,' says Marc Castellnou, the head of forestry for the Catalan regional fire department and a fire analyst at the University of Lleida. 'Since 2017, we've seen this change towards more extreme fires … It's nothing new – and it's happening because climate change is bringing higher temperatures for much longer periods.' The dynamics are not hard to discern. If you have annual heatwaves that arrive one after the other – and last longer and longer – in a country where decades of rural depopulation have left huge areas of land untended, overgrown or given over to homogenous cultivation, then you will have massive fires that are getting harder to fight. As one Spanish scientist noted earlier this week: 'We have all the ingredients for the molotov cocktail we're seeing right now.' Cristina Montiel, a professor at Madrid's Complutense University and an expert in forest fires and land use, says that while Spain's firefighters and other emergency services are doing an 'extraordinarily magnificent' job that is keeping far greater disasters at bay, the problem lies with society as a whole. Despite the annual fires and the abundance of evidence, she says, 'it turns out that we are not – and we do not want to be – aware of the danger in which we're living'. If we were even a little aware, she adds, 'we would take the measures and decisions to protect ourselves'. Fifty years ago, says Montiel, most forest fires were intentional. But today's forest fires are increasingly caused by accidents or negligence and are spreading so voraciously because of two factors: landscape change and climate change. It is an explosive combination. This year's heavy spring rains led to an increase in plant growth that has now been dried out by successive heatwaves, leaving all that combustible vegetation, much of it in neglected areas, ready to serve as fuel for the fires. The situation is further complicated by the phenomenon of 'flash droughts', which can quickly dry out even well-irrigated agricultural land, and which are likely to become more common as global heating continues. Paüls is a case in point. Its population has dwindled over the decades and fewer and fewer people in the area work the land because of the shrinking economic rewards. 'If there were 100 people working the land before, now there are 30,' says Adell. 'If the same policies continue and things remain as hard as they are, then in a few years, there'll be almost no one.' Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion All those years of abandonment had left ravines, gullies and pine forests overgrown and made them into temperature-activated timebombs. Last month's fire, says the mayor, was simply uncontrollable: 'We saw that there was no way of stopping it.' If there is much truth in the idea that preparation is all – and in the old maxim that 'fires are put out in winter' – the challenge now lies in undoing decades of neglect and bad planning that have seen the landscape forgotten and the appearance of housing developments in hazardous places. But Montiel cautions that the much-needed rethink will be neither quick nor easy. 'If things took a turn for the worse 50 years ago, we can now start changing them for the better,' she says. 'But you can't think that starting to change things now will pay off within two summers because that isn't true. These things are processes.' There are, however, already some signs that the message is getting through. After the Horta de Sant Joan fire 16 years ago, a group of shepherds approached the Catalan fire department to ask what they could do to prevent more blazes. The result was the Ramats de Foc (Fire Flocks) scheme, in which shepherds coordinate with firefighters to graze flocks of sheep and goats in areas with a high density of undergrowth and therefore high risk of fire. In areas cleared by the ruminants, firefighters have better access and, as there is less undergrowth, it is also easier to bring fires under control should they break out. 'We don't need more helicopters or firefighters,' says Marc Arcarons, who coordinates the initiative, which was launched in Girona in 2017 under the aegis of the not-for-profit Pau Costa Foundation. 'We could buy 200 more helicopters and it won't solve the problem. It's all about prevention and management.' The scheme also helps shepherds increase their existing incomes as those who participate can sell their meat or cheese at a premium as certified Ramats de Foc, so consumers know the produce is contributing to the preservation of the environment and the survival of traditional agriculture. About 120 shepherds have joined the project, which covers about 8,000 hectares (20,000 acres) in Catalonia. Similar schemes are planned or under way in the Canary Islands and Andalucía. Arcarons says that depopulation – and decreasing dependence on woodlands for building material and grazing since the 1960s – has caused what was once a patchwork of vineyards, olive groves and wheat fields to revert to dense forest. Fast-growing and highly flammable pines dominated, undergrowth flourished and this, combined with climate change and more frequent and longer periods of drought, has led to fires that are extremely difficult to control. 'It's like a chimney,' says Arcarons. 'If you keep throwing wood on the fire eventually the chimney will catch fire and the house will burn down.' Castellnou agrees that without adapting our landscapes to the realities of climate breakdown, we are sealing our fate. 'There's no point talking about more aeroplanes,' he says. 'If we limit our capacity for extinguishing fires by thinking we just need enough equipment to put them out then we're creating an unsustainable, artificial situation for summer after summer of extreme weather.'
BBC News
10 hours ago
- BBC News
Langdale Moor fire continues as smoke spreads 80 miles to Skipton
Firefighters are tackling a major moorland wildfire for a sixth day, with smoke from the blaze visible up to 80 miles (128km) engines remain on Langdale Moor in North Yorkshire, while a helicopter continues to drop water on the Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Service (NYFRS) said it expected to be at the scene for the next few crews in Skipton, 80 miles away, said they had been called to two separate incidents in relation to the smell of smoke, which they believed was being caused by the fire on Langdale Moor. A spokesperson said: "If anybody is wondering about a smog or mist settling over Skipton, we believe this to be smoke from Langdale Moor that has now reached Skipton due to wind direction."Please keep all BBQs to designated areas or preferably on your own property as national resources are currently spread very thin." Does controlled moorland burning reduce wildfire risk? Firefighters were first called to the moorland near RAF Fylingdales on Monday evening, with a major incident declared on its height, 19 fire appliances were at the services were suspended at the nearby North Yorkshire Moors Railway and a planned open day at Harrogate Fire Station was cancelled on Saturday because of "strain" on Dalby Forest Visitor Centre remaining open, Forestry England advised visitors to avoid the area due to large amounts of Friday, experts warned it could take "many decades, centuries or even thousands of years" for the moorland to recover from the Ingleby, from the North York Moors National Park Authority, said: "It's catastrophic for the habitats that are found in that location and the wildlife that currently lives there."It really is devastating and it will take probably 10 years or more for the heather to develop to that depth again to enable them [ground-nesting birds] to breed in the future." Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Reuters
10 hours ago
- Reuters
Sustainable Switch Climate Focus: Wildfires rage across southern Europe
Aug 15 - This is an excerpt of the Sustainable Switch Climate Focus newsletter, where we make sense of companies and governments grappling with climate change on Fridays. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox for free sign up here. Hello! Today's newsletter focuses on record-breaking heat gripping southern Europe and has unleashed a wave of devastating wildfires, forcing mass evacuations, claiming lives, and spurring a surge in arson arrests. Temperatures in Spain have pushed past 45 °C, drying landscapes into fuel and driving blazes from Portugal to Greece. Spain – now the epicenter – has lost about 148,000 hectares to flames this year, over a quarter of the EU's total burned area. At least seven people, including firefighters, have died, while some 9,500 residents have been evacuated. Authorities are confronting both natural ignition and deliberate acts, with ten arson arrests since June. Spain has appealed to its European partners for support, requesting aerial firefighting resources to bolster its strained response. In Portugal, nearly 1,000 firefighters battled a blaze near the scenic mountain village of Piodao. Crews managed to bring under control a wildfire burning for 11 days - the longest for this season - in the mountainous area of Vila Real in the north. In Greece, intense fires near Patras and on islands like Chios and Zakynthos have displaced thousands, overwhelmed emergency crews, and ravaged farmland and infrastructure. More than 5,000 firefighters and 33 aircraft are engaged in round-the-clock containment. Firefighters contained several wildfires raging across Turkey, including a large blaze in the northwestern province of Canakkale that forced hundreds to flee from their homes. Both Canakkale airport and the Dardanelles Strait, which connects the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara, were temporarily shut due to the wildfires earlier this week. A man also died in a fire in Albania, while a 61-year-old Hungarian seasonal worker is suspected to have died of heat-related causes while picking fruit in Lleida, in Spain's eastern Catalonia region. In Montenegro's mountainous Kuci area, northeast of the capital Podgorica, one army soldier was killed and another badly injured when a water tanker they were operating overturned, the Defence Ministry said. Global warming is giving the Mediterranean region hotter, drier summers, scientists say, with wildfires surging each year and sometimes whipping up into "whirls". WHAT TO WATCH Click here, opens new tab for an insightful Reuters video on Abdul Karim Abbas, a gardening volunteer who is attempting to fight one of Iraq's most pressing threats: desertification. NUMBER OF THE WEEK $275 million The total amount racked up by a Washington state entrepreneur and a former Jefferies portfolio manager over a Ponzi scheme and related fraud involving water vending machines, U.S. authorities said. Ryan Wear, the former owner of Water Station Management, was charged in Manhattan with securities and wire fraud. Jordan Chirico, who worked at Jefferies' Leucadia Asset Management unit, was charged with securities and investment adviser fraud. CLIMATE LENS Last month was Earth's third warmest July since records began and included a record national temperature in Turkey of 50.5 degrees Celsius (122.9 Fahrenheit), according to the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). The average global surface air temperature reached 16.68 C in July, which is 0.45 C above the 1991-2020 average for the month.
