博客

By the end of a scorching European summer, a continent-wide wildfire crisis was splitting into starkly divergent situations across the region on Sunday, with gale-force winds pushing flames closer to the Greek capital of Athens and triggering new evacuation orders, while France maintained a tense watch over a massive, still-active blaze that already carved a destruction zone four times the size of Paris, and major wildfires in Spain finally halted their spread.

Greece remained the epicenter of immediate, life-threatening risk on Sunday. Violent gale-force winds pushed growing fire lines deeper into western Attica, the administrative region that encompasses Athens, putting coastal villages and an industrial zone outside the city of Megara in grave danger. The same powerful gusts that amplified fire spread also grounded firefighting aircraft, preventing crews from scooping water from nearby seas to douse the flames.

As of Sunday, Greek authorities had ordered fresh mandatory evacuations for three additional communities: Kandili, Agia Skepi and Toutouli, with officials flagging particular concern for Porto Germeno, a popular seaside community on the Gulf of Corinth. Nearly 500 firefighters and 23 aircraft were deployed to contain the blaze, which ignited Friday near Agios Vasileios before sweeping toward coastal areas and pushing into the forested Geraneia Mountains west of Athens.

For coastal communities cut off by fast-moving flames and smoke, evacuation by sea became a last-resort escape route. By Saturday, rescuers had pulled 254 people from the sea near Agios Vasileios and an additional 12 from Porto Germeno. Wildfire meteorologist Theodore Giannaros estimated Saturday the blaze had already scorched between 40 and 50 square kilometers of land, though Greek officials had not released an official confirmed estimate as of Sunday.

Local resident Minas Tzortzanis, a farmer in the area, described the irreversible damage to the once-lush landscape. “A pristine forest, a paradise, was surrendered to the hands of the fire,” he said Saturday. “There are no words to explain what has happened. Destruction. Total destruction.”

The unfolding disaster carries grim historical weight for Greece: in 2018, a similarly wind-fueled wildfire trapped residents in the seaside Athens suburb of Mati, killing 104 people in what remains the deadliest wildfire Europe has seen this century.

Hundreds of kilometers to the west, where emergency conditions had begun to ease, little relief was available for thousands displaced by France’s largest wildfire on record. The Gironde megafire, which forced the evacuation of 224,000 people — what officials say is likely the largest peacetime evacuation in French history — has already scorched 420 square kilometers of dense forest, an area four times the size of the city of Paris. While the fire’s forward spread has been contained, active hotspots still burn deep within the destruction zone, and thousands of evacuated residents remain unable to return to their homes.

Nearly 3,000 firefighters are still deployed across two major French blazes: the Gironde megafire in the southwest, and a second large wildfire in Provence that stopped spreading but has not been fully contained. The Gironde region remains under France’s highest red wildfire alert, with persistent dry conditions, record-high temperatures near Bordeaux and expected afternoon winds continuing to raise the risk of the fire breaking through containment lines.

To reinforce overstretched crews, additional firefighters from Ukraine, Lithuania and French Polynesia were scheduled to arrive in the region over Sunday and Monday.

In southeastern France’s Var department, hundreds of kilometers from Gironde, nearly 1,500 firefighters continued to battle a separate blaze that tore through 18 square kilometers of the Gros Bessillon hills in just over 24 hours. Authorities reported the fire had been stabilized by Sunday morning, meaning its perimeter did not expand overnight, but it had not yet been declared fully contained.

Firefighting aircraft supported ground crews working to hold the fire back from small villages scattered across the vineyards, olive groves and wooded hills that give the region its nickname of Green Provence. Roughly 2,500 residents have been evacuated as the fire advanced, marking the fourth major wildfire to hit central Var since July 19. Earlier that week, a smaller blaze near Brignoles forced Hollywood actor George Clooney, his family and 700 other local residents to evacuate before it could be brought under control.

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu noted that most wildfires across the country were currently under control, but warned that conditions could shift rapidly at any time. He also announced that a national coordinator based out of the prime minister’s office would oversee long-term reconstruction efforts for communities and ecosystems damaged by the blazes. Since the start of 2022, more than 1,170 square kilometers of French land has burned in wildfires.

The ongoing wildfire crisis across Europe is unfolding against a well-documented climate backdrop: the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirms Europe has warmed more than twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, making it the world’s fastest-warming continent. Higher average temperatures and prolonged drought have left forests and scrubland far drier and more flammable, allowing wildfires to spread faster and burn with far greater intensity than in decades past.

In a rapid analysis released Thursday while French blazes were still actively spreading, a team of scientists from World Weather Attribution found that human-caused climate change has doubled the likelihood of the extreme fire weather conditions that fueled the Gironde megafire.

Taken together, wildfires in France and Spain alone have displaced roughly 330,000 people from their homes and summer vacation sites, emptied entire communities at the peak of tourist season, and stretched firefighting resources and emergency services thin as crews responded to multiple simultaneous disasters across the continent.

Across sweltering Western Europe, a record-breaking summer drought has left iconic infrastructure, agricultural sectors and key shipping routes reeling, with the low-lying Netherlands — a nation defined by its centuries-long battle to hold back water — facing an unprecedented test of its famed flood defense network. As wildfires rage across southern France and Spain, and major waterways including the Danube and Rhine drop to historic lows, the Netherlands has mobilized hundreds of volunteers to patrol its thousands of kilometers of dikes, hunting for hidden cracks and weaknesses that could spell disaster in future rain events.

Near the small agricultural town of Waddinxveen, located east of The Hague and roughly 5 meters below sea level, volunteers Jeroen Wouda and Dirk Boom follow a slow, methodical route along an inland peat dike, probing the bone-dry earthen embankment with metal rods and scanning parched grass for subtle patches of green that signal an unseen leak. This modern patrol echoes the centuries-old folk tale of the Dutch boy who plugged a dike breach with his finger, but today’s monitoring uses 21st-century tools: volunteers log potential flaws directly in a mobile app, alerting water authorities who can dispatch repair crews within hours.

Peter van Duijvendijk, flood defense manager at the Schieland en de Krimpenerwaard water corporation, one of 21 regional water management bodies that oversee flood protection across the Netherlands, says 140 trained volunteers in his district alone patrol 100 kilometers of dikes throughout the dry season. So far, no major structural damage has been detected, but patrols will remain active through the fall as soil conditions stay unstable. “These volunteers are our eyes and ears on the dike,” van Duijvendijk explained to the Associated Press. Unlike concrete coastal flood barriers, inland dikes in the Netherlands are often built from peat, a porous organic soil that relies on consistent moisture to retain its structural strength. When peat dries out, it shrinks and weakens, creating gaps that can allow water to breach the barrier and flood low-lying reclaimed polder land during periods of heavy rain. “Because it is so dry right now the peat loses moisture, and because of that it becomes weaker,” van Duijvendijk said. “If that peat becomes weaker, then there is a chance that water will flow through the dike.”

The drought’s impacts extend far beyond dike integrity, rippling through regional economies and critical transport networks. The Rhine, Europe’s most vital inland freight waterway that connects North Sea ports to industrial heartlands in Germany and landlocked Central Europe, dropped below its 2018 record low near Cologne, Germany, over the weekend. Marcel Beck, manager of the western German ports of Neuss, Düsseldorf and Cologne for logistics firm RheinCargo, called the low water levels “devastating” for commercial shipping. Whereas a single cargo vessel can typically carry 2,000 to 2,500 metric tons of freight along the Rhine, water depths are now so shallow that most ships can only load 400 to 600 metric tons to avoid running aground on sandbars. “This places an enormous burden on the entire transport chain to reorganize everything in order to still get the goods inland,” Beck said. In the eastern Netherlands, the Waal river — the main Dutch branch of the Rhine — has receded so far that long-submerged items like rusted bicycles and discarded shopping carts are now exposed on the dry riverbed, and dozens of houseboats are sitting directly on the exposed sandy river bottom. Frans Schilte, a houseboat owner in the city of Nijmegen, has observed that low-water seasons have grown longer and more severe in recent years, extending from the historic one-month average to three full months. His own steel-hulled boat now rests on the riverbed, sitting slightly off-level as a result. “It’s not a big problem,” Schilte said, “but it’s the negative effect of climate change.”

For the Netherlands, a country where roughly one-third of total land sits below sea level, managing water has always required a delicate balancing act: winter brings the constant threat of catastrophic flooding, while extended summer droughts increasingly bring the opposite problem of water scarcity. Deltares, an independent Dutch water research institute, says the country has enough total annual freshwater to meet all needs, but seasonal distribution is the core challenge. “In the winter we drain it away quickly because we want to keep our feet dry and we don’t want water on the land,” explained Vince Kaandorp, a groundwater hydrologist at Deltares. “How can you ensure that you do that slowly and give water time to sink into the ground?” Kaandorp notes that solutions don’t require massive high-tech infrastructure: simple adjustments like adding hedgerows along river banks can slow runoff, giving rainwater more time to seep into deep groundwater reserves. Dutch water authorities are currently researching how to modify agricultural and riparian soil to act like natural sponges, holding more moisture through dry summer months.

Even with these adaptive measures, the drought has already caused significant disruption for Dutch agriculture. Some regions have banned farmers from pumping canal water for crop irrigation as authorities work to preserve freshwater supplies and prevent saltwater intrusion into low-lying reclaimed lands. Western Dutch polders, which produce much of the country’s fruit and vegetable crops, are facing increasing salinization as freshwater levels drop and seawater seeps into groundwater reserves. Farmers are warning of reduced harvests and higher consumer prices for summer fruit this year. “It is an extremely challenging year for growers,” said John Kusters, chair of the Netherlands Fruit Growers’ Organization, in a public statement.