More than 100 wildfires were burning in northern Spain as authorities say record-high temperatures in the country are increasing the fire hazard.
In his more than a decade battling wildfires, firefighter Manuel Rubio had never seen a blaze like the one that raged for the past week in easternThe forest fire that that broke out last Thursday near the village of Villanueva de Viver surprised Rubio and fire experts by displaying an unusual ferocity for spring, when in previous years lower temperatures helped keep fires manageable. That doesn't bode well for a country that led Europe in burned land during a record-hot 2022.
Those conditions have turned Spain’s vast expanses of woods into a tinderbox just waiting for the random lightning strike, spark from a tractor or saw, negligently cast cigarette, or act of arson to ignite the landscape. “Unfortunately, over the last few years these fires are becoming normal. What is not so normal is that we see them in March,” Sánchez said on Monday. “This has a lot to do with the climate emergency that the world is facing.”
To make things tougher for Rubio and his fellow firefighters, the area is full of tiny villages that are surrounded by trees, making them difficult to protect. A generation ago, the lands were tended to by the villagers. Now that younger generations have abandoned those agricultural jobs, which included collecting firewood, the land is overgrown with dense foliage that fuels fires when dry.
The spokesperson for Spain’s weather service, Rubén del Campo, warned Wednesday that higher temperatures, reaching 5-10 degrees Celsius above average, were forecast for Castellon and the rest of eastern Spain in the coming days. He said the expected temperatures are “normally seen in mid-to-late May.”
The region home to Barcelona is suffering its worst drought on record and temperatures beat yearly averages by a full 2.7 degrees Celsius last year. The director of Catalonia weather service, Sarai Sarroca, said Wednesday that their climate models hadn't expected such a huge surge in temperature until the year 2050.
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