Spain faces 3rd week of warning by heat wave and continues to fight forest fires

People use facial coverage while a forest fire Assola Veiga das Meas, near Verin, province of Ourense, Galicia, Spain. Reuters/Nacho Sweet to Spain, which enters its third week of warning warning, continues to fight forest fires, concentrated in the northwest and west of the country. Even the army was mobilized to help fight the flames. The regions of Castile and Leão, Galicia, Asturias and Extremadura are currently the main outbreaks of forest fires. A man holds a fire scout while a forest fire plagues Veiga from Meas in Galicia. Reuters/Nacho Sweet Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez attended this Saturday (16) in a coordination meeting on the fires “to analyze their evolution”. He said that after the departure of two tanker loan aircraft by France, “two new Italian Canadair planes, provided by the European Civil Protection mechanism, arrived at the Matacán Air Base (Salamanca).” “The government continues to work to combat fire with all means at its disposal,” he said on social network X, while the management of fires increasingly feeds political debate. Locked highways and railways about ten highways remain blocked in the country, as well as the railway line between Madrid and Galicia, on the last day 15. Emergency services in Galicia sent alert messages to mobile phones, asking the population of several dozen locations to remain at home. “If you receive this warning: keep calm and read the text carefully (…) Given the advancement of fires, avoid unnecessary displacements and stay home. If you are outdoors and have nowhere to take shelter, move away from affected areas,” the message said. Spain asks the EU help to try to contain about 3,500 military personnel from the Military Emergency Unit), triggered in cases of serious fires, are distributed among the most worrying places. The region of Castile and Leão, through its regional administrator Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, asked the central government of the socialist Pedro Sánchez “in the face of an exceptional situation caused by extreme weather conditions and the multiplication of fires (…) an exceptional response: in addition to the regional and UME units, we need more effective army available to the regions”. Extremadura also made an official request for reinforcements to the government, in a country where firefighting is, in principle, the competence of the regions, and the government only intervenes in cases of large -scale disasters. The region also requested the reactivation of the European Civil Protection mechanism, asking for 100 fire trucks, 10 light helicopters and 10 amphibious helicopters. Heat in Europe Spain should remain on alert because of heat by Monday (18), and extreme temperatures significantly increased the risk of fires. Smoke from forest fires in Spain and Portugal has arrived in the United Kingdom, according to the Met Office Meteorological Service on Network X. A drone image shows burnt vegetation, while forest fires devastate the province of Ourense, Galicia. Reuters/Guillermo Martinez in a statement, the service explained that the smoke “will continue to move over some regions of the UK over the weekend, making the sky eneborded or whitish at certain times.” Since the beginning of the year, more than 157,000 hectares have been consumed by the flames in Spain, according to the real -time map of the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis).

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