<\/p>\n
Thousands of firefighters backed by soldiers and water-bombing aircraft on Monday battled over 20 major wildfires raging across western Spain, where officials say a record area of land has already been burnt.<\/p>\n
Spain and neighbouring Portugal have been particularly affected by forest fires fuelled by heatwaves and drought blamed on climate change that have hit southern Europe.<\/p>\n
Two firefighters were killed on Sunday \u2014 one in each country, both in road accidents \u2014 taking the death toll to two in Portugal and four in Spain.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Spain\u2019s civil protection chief Virginia Barcones told public television TVE that 23 blazes were classified as \u201coperational level two\u201d, meaning they pose a direct threat to nearby communities.<\/p>\n
The fires, now entering their second week, are concentrated in the western regions of Castile and Leon, Galicia and Extremadura, where thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes.<\/p>\n
Residents said they were frustrated with what they regarded as poor preparation and limited resources.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a feeling of helplessness and indignation \u2014 at the lack of resources, at the neglect, at the disastrous management,\u201d Jose Carlos Fernandez, a 47-year-old massage therapist from Benavente in Castile and Leon, told AFP by telephone.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe air is unbreathable, very thick, and the smell of smoke is coming into homes.\u201d<\/p>\n
More than 343,000 hectares (848,000 acres) of land \u2014 the equivalent of nearly half a million football pitches \u2014 have been destroyed this year in Spain, setting a new national record, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).<\/p>\n
The previous record of 306,000 hectares was set in the same period three years ago.<\/p>\n
Spain is being helped with firefighting aircraft from France, Italy, Slovakia and the Netherlands, while Portugal is receiving air support from Sweden and Morocco.<\/p>\n
But the size and severity of the fires and the intensity of the smoke \u2014 visible from space \u2014 were making \u201cairborne action\u201d difficult,\u201d Spanish Defence Minister Margarita Robles told TVE.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a very difficult, very complicated situation,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
In Ourense province of Galicia, signs of the fires were everywhere, from ashen forests and blackened soil to destroyed homes, with thick smoke forcing people to wear masks.<\/p>\n
Firefighters battled the flames as locals in just shorts and T-shirts used water from hoses and buckets to try to stop the spread.<\/p>\n
One resident in O Barco de Valdeorras, dousing his home with water from a hosepipe, described the wildfire that ripped through his area as \u201clike a bomb\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt came from below and it was like a hurricane,\u201d he said. \u201cThe good thing was that in two minutes it headed up and it didn\u2019t stay here long.\u201d<\/p>\n
Across the border in Portugal, some 2,000 firefighters were deployed across the \u00a0north and centre of the country on Monday, with about half of them concentrated in the town of Arganil.<\/p>\n
Some 216,000 hectares of land have been destroyed across Portugal since the start of the year.<\/p>\n
Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said the country had endured 24 days of weather conditions of \u201cunprecedented severity\u201d with high temperature and strong winds.<\/p>\n
Officials in both countries expressed hope that the weather would turn to help tackle the fires.<\/p>\n
Spain\u2019s meteorological agency said the heatwave, which has seen temperatures hit 45C in parts of the country, was coming to an end.<\/p>\n
Officials in Castile and Leon said a firefighter died on Sunday night when the water truck he was driving flipped over on a steep forest road and down a slope, days after two other volunteer firefighters were killed in the region.<\/p>\n
A Romanian employee of a riding school north of Madrid lost his life trying to protect horses from the fire.<\/p>\n
In Portugal, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said a firefighter died on Sunday in a traffic accident that left two colleagues seriously injured.<\/p>\n
A former mayor in the eastern town of Guarda died on Friday while trying to tackle a fire.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Rephrase in a different way as if you were a native American speaker as a content creation expert and do not talk about yourself or your experience in the text and do not show yourself as an artificial intelligence who wrote and fill the bullet point in the topic and speak the heart of the topic itself and dont take date of blog in ther first and dont take text like box of newsliter subscribe on post from content and romove all linke insert in content and and remove all affiliate disclosure phrases on content like this “This post may contain Amazon or other affiliate links that allow us to earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Please see our Disclosure Policy for more info” and “#” put in its place bullet point, and romove name of the web site or his links we are take a content from our new creation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thousands of firefighters backed by soldiers and water-bombing aircraft on Monday battled over 20 major wildfires raging across western Spain, where officials say a record area of land has already been burnt. Spain and neighbouring Portugal have been particularly affected by forest fires fuelled by heatwaves and drought blamed on climate change that have hit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":9746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[940,2070,9075,3092,3096,3097,3073,1182,234,3095,2339,3093,9074,933,3088,1235,3094,3098,9073],"class_list":["post-9745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-international","tag-american","tag-area","tag-burnt","tag-characters","tag-content","tag-creation","tag-deadly","tag-dont","tag-experience","tag-expert","tag-land","tag-native","tag-rage","tag-record","tag-rephrase","tag-spain","tag-speaker","tag-talk","tag-wildfires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9745"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9747,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9745\/revisions\/9747"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}