分类： environment

One of the deadliest wildfires in recent Spanish history, which claimed at least 12 lives as residents and visitors fled its rapid advance in southern Spain’s Andalusia region, has been fully contained, officials announced Sunday. The containment order clears the way for roughly 1,500 displaced people to return to their properties over a phased timeline.

Juan Manuel Moreno, president of the regional Andalusian government, confirmed to reporters that the blaze has been locked within its burned perimeter with no remaining risk of spread. “This marks, in a sense, the beginning of the end of a terrifying wildfire that set records for the speed of its advance,” Moreno said.

The first wave of returning residents, made up of around 600 people evacuated from Almeria province’s high-risk fire zone, were allowed to go back to their homes Saturday evening. The remaining 1,000 evacuees will follow in staged groups to ensure safety, Moreno added.

Scorched, abandoned vehicles still sit along rural roads where many victims became trapped as the fire raced through the landscape at speeds of up to 100 meters per minute. All 12 confirmed fatalities were people who became trapped in their vehicles or while attempting to escape on foot, according to official accounts.

Jerome Navarro, a French tourist who arrived at his Spanish holiday home just as the fire advanced, described the chaotic speed of the blaze to French media Saturday. “I said to my wife ‘Get out quick, leave everything. Get out.’ And the time it took to say that I was engulfed in a ball of fire,” a tearful Navarro recalled. Navarro survived by throwing himself into a ditch and crawling to safety, but his wife remains missing.

Officials have kept the official death toll at 12, noting that the full number of missing people cannot be confirmed until autopsies and DNA identification of recovered remains are complete. Many of the victims are believed to be foreign nationals, a detail that has slowed identification work as officials wait for DNA samples from relatives traveling from overseas.

Spain’s Civil Guard is conducting a final, comprehensive search of the fire-ravaged area Sunday to account for all missing residents and visitors. Civil Protection Secretary-General Virginia Barcones told Spain’s public broadcaster that officers have already cleared more than 250 homes to confirm no one was trapped inside, and the final sweep will confirm no unaccounted victims remain. “I sincerely hope they don’t find anyone else, but we need to carry out one final thorough search to make sure that’s the case,” Barcones said.

A shift to calmer winds and higher atmospheric humidity allowed firefighters to launch direct assaults on the blaze for the first time Saturday, bringing the fast-moving fire under control after days of difficult conditions. Around 500 firefighters, supported by water-dropping helicopters and aircraft, have worked around the clock to contain the blaze that broke out Thursday in the Gallardos area, a region popular with foreign retirees and holiday homeowners.

Authorities suspect the fire started when a power line snapped amid an prolonged extreme heatwave that has pushed regional temperatures above 40°C for weeks. Unusually wet winter and spring conditions spurred dense vegetation growth across the region, which then fully dried out in successive heatwaves, creating ample fuel for a catastrophic blaze. So far, the fire has destroyed roughly 7,000 hectares of land.

Manoli Ramos, a 72-year-old city councilor in the small village of Bedar where multiple victims were found, described the scene as apocalyptic. “We were absolutely terrified. We could see the flames. It was horrific, it was like hell,” Ramos told AFP.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is scheduled to visit the fire-stricken area Monday to meet with first responders and displaced residents. Scientists have widely documented that human-caused climate change from fossil fuel emissions is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events that drive major wildfires across Southern Europe. Last year, wildfires burned nearly 400,000 hectares of land across Spain — the highest annual total recorded by the European Forest Fire Information System in the country’s history.

A powerful typhoon that carved a destructive path across the Pacific has made landfall in eastern China, forcing nearly 2 million people across multiple regions to abandon their homes for safer ground in one of the largest pre-storm evacuation efforts in recent years. Typhoon Bavi came ashore around 11:20 pm local time Saturday in Yuhuan, a city in China’s coastal Zhejiang province, carrying maximum sustained winds of 144 kilometers per hour, according to the provincial meteorological observatory in a report carried by China’s official Xinhua News Agency.

Before reaching the Chinese mainland, the storm system already left a wake of disruption across northern Taiwan and Japan’s remote southwestern Ryukyu Islands, toppling urban trees, cutting electrical power to tens of thousands of households, and forcing widespread shutdowns of businesses and transport links. The landfall comes as China has already faced a week of devastating extreme weather across its central and southern regions, where earlier storms killed at least 39 people, swelled dozens of rivers past flood stages, and caused a reservoir dam to collapse.

Meteorologists forecast Bavi will continue tracking northwest after landfall, gradually weakening as it moves inland. As of Saturday morning, Chinese authorities had already relocated 1.72 million residents in high-risk zones to emergency shelters. In anticipation of the storm’s arrival, Zhejiang suspended all in-person classes, non-essential work, public transport and outdoor events, canceling more than 400 flights and dozens of intercity train services to minimize risk.

Wenzhou, a major Zhejiang metropolis home to nearly 10 million people, emphasized in an official statement that its full-scale, proactive mobilization left no resource spared, with all efforts focused on preparing for the worst possible outcome. Footage from state broadcaster CCTV showed local residents reinforcing shop shutters with wooden planks and applying protective tape to windows, as forecasters warned Bavi would bring exceptionally heavy rainfall to eastern Zhejiang and neighboring northeastern Fujian province.

Further north, torrential pre-emptive rainfall prompted Beijing authorities to evacuate more than 100,000 residents, as the capital increased water discharge flows from the strategic Miyun Reservoir to create extra storage capacity for incoming floodwaters. State media reports show an additional 130,000 residents have been evacuated across Fujian, while roughly 34,000 people left high-risk and coastal areas of Shanghai.

In northern Taiwan, streets sat largely empty as businesses remained closed for a second consecutive day, battered by strong wind and heavy rain. The storm forced the evacuation of more than 14,000 residents across the island, canceled hundreds of flights, and left more than 170,000 households without power. Taiwan’s Central Weather Administration warned of extremely torrential rain across northern sections of the island and dangerous coastal waves reaching up to 10 meters as Bavi passed just north of Taiwan’s coastline.

The storm system’s origins stretch back to earlier this week, when it made landfall in Guam and the Northern Marianas as a powerful super typhoon before weakening to a standard typhoon as it moved west across the Pacific. The death toll from Bavi has already climbed to 18 in the Philippines, where the storm triggered deadly landslides and flooding, mostly on the southern island of Mindanao. Nearly 11,000 Filipinos have fled their homes, dozens of ports remain closed, and more than 300 vessels have been forced to seek shelter in safe harbors.

In Japan, thousands of households and public facilities across Okinawa Prefecture lost power when Bavi pounded the southwestern islands, with the Miyako region suffering the worst damage. Japanese carriers canceled dozens of domestic flights, disrupting travel plans for more than 26,000 passengers.

Climate scientists have linked the increasing intensity of tropical storms like Bavi to rising ocean temperatures. Last week, the European Union’s Copernicus Marine Service confirmed that oceans globally recorded their hottest June on record, with projections that new temperature records will be set in the coming months. Warmer ocean waters fuel more rapid intensification of tropical cyclones and add more moisture to storm systems, which translates to heavier rainfall when they make landfall. This year’s weather has been further amplified by the return of El Niño, a natural climate pattern that warms Pacific surface temperatures and occurs every two to seven years.

Initially, forecasters predicted Bavi would become the strongest typhoon to hit Taiwan in more than 30 years, but CWA senior forecaster Jason Cheng noted the storm’s strong wind radius has since shrunk to 350 kilometers. The shifted forecast and scaled-back impact left some Taiwanese residents frustrated with the early government warnings that prompted widespread shutdowns. “Look at how it caused people to scramble for groceries and clear out supermarket shelves. Honestly, there hasn’t even been much wind or rain these past two days,” said Li, a breakfast shop owner in the northern coastal city of Keelung.

The arid hills of southeastern Spain’s Mediterranean coast, long a quiet haven for retirees and holidaymakers from across Europe, have been reduced to ash by a devastating fast-moving wildfire that has claimed 12 lives and scorched more than 6,000 hectares of land. Survivors of the blaze, which broke out last Thursday amid record-breaking extreme heat that turned dry vegetation into a tinderbox, have shared harrowing accounts of sudden escape and narrow survival as flames advanced faster than many could outrun.

When the fire’s edge began to encroach on the small village of Bedar, the epicenter of the disaster, 72-year-old local town councillor Manoli Ramos received an urgent, last-minute order from the mayor: race to the village church and ring its bells to sound the alarm for residents who had not yet received official evacuation alerts. “We rang the bells many times so people would know,” Ramos told AFP from her temporary refuge in nearby Los Gallardos, one of hundreds of displaced residents who fled their homes as the blaze moved through the region.

Official preliminary investigations point to a broken power line as the likely ignition source, with the extreme heat wave that has gripped southern Spain creating ideal conditions for the fire to spread rapidly. Most of the 12 victims killed were foreign residents, many of whom died trapped in their vehicles or while attempting to escape on foot. Officials have noted that many of the foreign residents in the area live in scattered, isolated properties outside the core of Bedar, drawn by the privacy and quiet of the rural hillside — a choice that left many with slower access to emergency warnings and fewer clear escape routes as the fire advanced.

“Foreigners live scattered outside Bedar,” Ramos explained. “They have beautiful homes and their belongings. They like living a little away from the centre.”

For 52-year-old Moroccan resident Hassan Oulghazzi, who has called Bedar home for 16 years, the first sign of danger was not visible flames, but an ominous dark cloud hanging over the hills that quickly turned into thick, choking black smoke. Before he could spot the fire advancing, local police were pounding on his front door, ordering him to leave immediately.

“How could you not be afraid?” Oulghazzi said. “When someone knocks on your door and tells you: ‘Get up, come on, leave here. This is real, you have to go.’” He fled with his wife and daughter with only the clothes they were wearing, leaving all their possessions behind. The family has since taken shelter at a municipal sports hall in the coastal town of Garrucha, where the Red Cross is providing food, medical care and support to hundreds of evacuees. For Oulghazzi, his own fear of displacement pales in comparison to the grief of losing neighbors and acquaintances in the blaze.

“Everyone was afraid, but I am really touched by the dead and those who were burned. I really am,” he said. “There are some people I know.”

Local officials have confirmed that some of the victims did not follow official orders to evacuate early or shelter in place once the flames reached their properties, a choice that proved fatal as the fire moved faster than many anticipated. For survivors who did escape, the scale of the destruction is still difficult to process, with many describing the scene as something out of a disaster film, not real life.

Eighty-seven-year-old British evacuee Austin Crilly, who has lived in the region for years and says he has weathered no shortage of crises, told reporters that Thursday’s blaze was unlike anything he had ever experienced. Crilly was watching television at home when he spotted what he thought was an unusual large dark cloud on the horizon. Minutes later, police arrived at his door with a direct order to evacuate immediately. “Take your money, take your cards and get out,” he recalled officers telling him. Like many other evacuees, Crilly has been staying at the Garrucha sports hall, waiting for updates on when it will be safe to return to assess his home.

British couple Martin and Elizabeth Smith, who were staying at a local campsite for a holiday, echoed that sense of surrealism. Martin Smith, 63, who has already had to cut his trip short and return to the United Kingdom, said the chaos of the escape was something he had only ever seen on screen. “It wasn’t good. Not good at all. I’d never seen anything like it. You see things like that in films, but never in real life,” he said. Despite the trauma of the disaster, Smith added that the fire has not dimmed his affection for Spain as a holiday destination. “It hasn’t put us off coming to Spain,” he said.

As a record-breaking third heatwave bears down on France, a quarter of the nation’s mainland territory has been placed under the country’s highest heat warning, forcing iconic Paris landmarks including the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and the Musee d’Orsay to shut their doors hours earlier than their usual summer schedules.

France’s national meteorological service Meteo-France placed 24 mainland departments — home to more than 22 million people, per an Agence France-Presse tally — on maximum red heat alert on Saturday. An additional 59 departments across mainland France remain under an orange heat warning, one tier below the highest emergency level. The extreme heat has hit during a busy national holiday weekend, with millions of travelers crowding national highways and rail networks ahead of the July 14 Bastille Day celebration.

A spokesperson for the Eiffel Tower, the 324-meter steel monument that draws 7 million annual visitors and typically stays open past midnight during peak summer tourist season, confirmed that the landmark would implement extraordinary early closures at 4 p.m. (1400 GMT) both Saturday and Sunday, a measure put in place directly due to projected extreme high temperatures. Two of Paris’s other most visited cultural institutions have followed suit: the Louvre, the world’s most-visited art museum, will close at 4 p.m. from Friday through Monday, while the Musee d’Orsay will shut at 5 p.m. from Saturday through Wednesday in response to the extreme heat.

Beyond disrupted tourist schedules, the heatwave has forced widespread cancellations of traditional Bastille Day firework displays across hundreds of French towns. Officials cited elevated wildfire risk and extremely dry vegetation conditions for the cancellations. A senior French official confirmed Friday that wildfires have already burned twice as much land across France in 202X as they did during the same period last year. Speaking on Saturday, President Emmanuel Macron urged the public to remain vigilant, noting that 9 out of 10 wildfires in the country stem from human activity.

“One single moment of inattention can put families at risk, endanger the first responders who protect us, and destroy our natural landscapes,” Macron wrote in a post on social platform X.

This heatwave marks the third extreme heat event to hit France since May. A record-shattering heatwave in June pushed official excess death figures above 2,000, with an additional 300 excess deaths recorded during a late May heat event, according to national public health data. The French government has faced growing public criticism in recent weeks, with opponents and climate experts accusing the administration of being unprepared for the rising frequency of extreme heat events, a trend climate scientists have directly linked to anthropogenic climate change. Meteo-France forecasts that high temperatures will persist across the country through Bastille Day on July 14.