标签： Europe

As catastrophic wildfires scorch southern France and Spain and a second blistering heat wave builds across Western Europe, a years-long persistent drought is pushing one of Europe’s most critical waterways to unprecedented lows, laying bare the tangible, immediate impacts of human-caused climate change for communities and industries across the continent. The Danube River, which cuts a 1,770-mile path through 10 European nations from the Black Forest of southwestern Germany to the Black Sea, has dropped to never-recorded depths along most of its route, revealing long-submerged rock formations, sand bars, and century-old shipwrecks that have remained hidden for generations.

In Budapest, the capital of Hungary, the country’s national water authority recorded a water level of just 23 centimeters (9 inches) on Wednesday morning, a full 10 centimeters below the previous all-time low set in 2018. With no meaningful rainfall forecast for the coming days and temperatures projected to surge past 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) across the entire Danube basin, officials warn the river will continue to recede further.

Much of Central Europe has faced persistent, extreme drought for the majority of 2022, and back-to-back record heat waves have accelerated evaporation, draining rivers and streams at an alarming rate. Data from the Hungarian Meteorological Service shows 90-day total precipitation across nearly the entire country is 80 to 130 millimeters (3.1 to 5.1 inches) below the long-term average for the period.

On Tuesday, after the Danube hit its new record low, Budapest-based photographer Gábor Kertész traveled to the base of the city’s iconic Margaret Bridge — a spot that is almost always submerged, now exposed as a dry sand shoal — to capture the unprecedented scene. “The bare rocks, the dry sand bars around the bridge pillars… it’s all shocking to see how things were before and how they are now,” Kertész told reporters. “Where will this lead, what will happen? We don’t know that yet, but this must be the result of climate change.”

The record low water has already upended key economic activities across every nation along the river’s path. Popular international river cruises, a mainstay of Central European tourism that brings millions of visitors to Budapest annually, have been forced to dock kilometers upriver from their customary terminals, forcing passengers to arrange alternate transportation to reach city sightseeing routes. Commercial cargo shipping has nearly ceased entirely across large stretches of the river, according to Hungary’s Ministry of Transport and Investment.

In northwestern Bulgaria, where the Danube forms the natural border with Romania, authorities evacuated 186 passengers from the cruise ship Viking Ullur on Tuesday after the vessel ran aground on an unexpected shallow shoal near the port city of Vidin. The ship had been scheduled to restock food and water supplies in Vidin, but could not reach the port after running aground, leaving passengers without adequate provisions, according to Bulgaria’s state-run news agency BTA. While all passengers were safely evacuated, the ship’s 52-person crew may remain on board for an extended period while authorities assess navigation conditions and plan refloating operations, Bulgarian police confirmed.

Further downstream in northern Serbia, hundreds of small recreational vessels and dozens of large cargo ships remain stranded on dried-out riverbanks near the city of Novi Sad. Radovan Segrt, a houseboat owner who operates popular river excursion tours for tourists, told the Associated Press that the Danube’s shoreline has retreated “some 15 to 20 meters (50 to 65 feet) from its original position.” “The summer season is over now, as far as boat riding is concerned,” Segrt said.

Beyond transportation and tourism, the dropping water levels have also forced cuts to critical nuclear energy production across the region. The Danube’s cool water is routinely used to cool reactor cores at multiple nuclear plants along its banks, and reduced flow has made safe operation impossible for some facilities. In Romania, where Danube flow dropped to just 1,630 cubic meters per second — roughly one-third of the typical average for July — authorities shut down one reactor unit at the Cernavoda nuclear power plant on Tuesday for safety reasons, and announced a second unit would be taken offline imminently.

In Hungary, the Paks nuclear plant — which generates nearly 40% of the country’s total electricity supply — began powering down one reactor on Wednesday after two consecutive rounds of output reductions at two other reactors over the prior 48 hours, all due to limited access to cooling water.

The exposed riverbed has brought unexpected oddities alongside the widespread disruption, including both hidden dangers and rare opportunities for amateur historians and treasure hunters. Last week, Budapest officials closed the Margaret Bridge for 48 hours after an unexploded World War II aerial bomb was exposed by receding waters at the bridge’s base, forcing a controlled detonation by bomb disposal units.

Amateur treasure hunter Zsolt Horváth told reporters he was taking advantage of the extreme low water to recover historical artifacts from the exposed riverbank on Tuesday, using a powerful magnet to pull metal objects from the mud. He said he had already uncovered rare items including an early 20th-century radio amplifier and bullet casings from both World Wars. “Having so little water in the Danube is a blessing for this kind of activity, otherwise, it’s a curse,” Horváth explained.

The report featured contributions from Associated Press correspondents across four European nations, including Stephen McGrath in Leamington Spa, England, Veselin Toshkov in Sofia, Bulgaria, Béla Szandelszky in Budapest, Hungary, and Radul Radovanovic in Novi Sad, Serbia.

Amid sweltering temperatures soaring to nearly 40 degrees Celsius, massive wildfires have been ravaging the pine forests of southwestern France’s Gironde region for a full week, displacing tens of thousands of residents and tourists and triggering a massive, multi-pronged firefighting operation.

On the front lines, the battle against the blazes combines high-flying aerial support and relentless ground effort. Three Canadair water-bombing aircraft arrived in tight formation, banking sharply toward a towering black plume of smoke before releasing their combined payload of more than 3,000 gallons of water directly onto the advancing flames. The air assault continued immediately after, as a line of helicopters followed up, dumping streams of bright red fire retardant to slow the fire’s spread.

Once the initial aerial assault eases the intensity of a flare-up, ground crews move in on foot to contain the blaze. But with parched, tinder-dry conditions across the region, reignitions are a constant, deadly threat. Twenty minutes after the flare-up observed by reporters was brought under control, a new fire ignited spontaneously on the opposite side of the road, prompting a harried order from a law enforcement officer: “Leave now!” As smoke thickened rapidly, the reporting team was forced to evacuate.

The scale of the inferno is so vast that smoke drifts across entire landscapes, blanketing empty highways and abandoned villages from Bordeaux westward. The underlying conditions explain the fire’s explosive spread: the region’s soil has turned to powder, layered with thick accumulations of dry pine cones and dead foliage that ignite and spread flames almost instantly.

For many local residents, the urge to defend their homes has overridden evacuation orders. Pierre Alexandre, whose bungalow sits adjacent to the original fire’s epicenter, refused to leave when first ordered by firefighters, sending his wife and daughter to safety but allowing his 19-year-old son Clément to stay with him. Alexandre even climbed onto his roof to monitor the advancing blaze, capturing an image that looked like it was taken at night due to the thick, dark smoke blanketing the area mid-afternoon. Though he acknowledges he and his son are not trained firefighters and cannot stop the blaze on their own, his choice to stay reflects the deep connection locals have to the land they call home.

For professional firefighters, the fight is less about extinguishing the entire blaze and more about a exhausting game of cat and mouse, containing flare-ups one by one rather than achieving a full victory. Backing up the professional crews is a sprawling army of local volunteers, many of whom have returned to the region from far away to help protect their communities.

Twenty-six-year-old Hugo, who grew up in the area, traveled back from his home in Bali to defend his mother’s house in the village of Arès, which sits dangerously close to the active fire line. “If it’s too late, at least we tried,” he said defianty as he refilled his water tank. “Fifty thousand hectares has already been destroyed, what will we tell our children?”

Twenty-three-year-old Maëlys, a nurse who has lived in the region her whole life, splits her days between her hospital shift and fighting fires on the front lines, her face permanently smudged with soot. “It’s horrible, it’s our home, it’s our region, it’s our forest, it’s where we grew up, it’s where our family live, where we live, it’s horrible. I feel a lot of sadness,” she said. Working with friends who own large water tanks, she helps extinguish small new flare-ups before they can grow into larger blazes.

Firefighting reinforcements have poured in from every corner of France, from northern Brittany to the southern cities of Marseille and Lyon. When crews are not actively dousing active flames, they carry out a technique called noyer—French for “drowning”—where they douse soil and unburned vegetation to prevent new fires from taking hold and spreading.

While the largest blazes in Gironde are currently under relative control, officials warn the infernos are far from fully extinguished. With high temperatures forecast to hold and the landscape remaining primed for ignition, the dangerous game of whack-a-mole on the fire lines will continue for the foreseeable future.

In the sun-dappled vineyards of Bordeaux, one of France’s most celebrated wine-producing regions, local winemaker Edouard le Grix de la Salle catches a disconcerting scent on the wind these days: the acrid tang of burning forests, carried from massive wildfires that have ripped through the Gironde department in southwest France. For this region, where wine, tourism and natural beauty form the backbone of local livelihoods, that smoke isn’t just an unpleasant reminder of environmental destruction — it’s a harbinger of deep economic pain for a community already on the edge.

The current wildfire season has scorched an expanse of land four times the total area of Paris, forced 220,000 people to evacuate their homes, and shuttered multiple popular tourist destinations across southern France. For France’s already strained national economy, the disaster is shaping up to be a major new setback.

Patrick Seguin, president of the regional chamber of commerce, described the dual crisis of environmental and economic collapse in raw, emotional terms during a recent phone interview. “It’s a physical apocalypse when you see all these sites where there’s nothing left aside from burnt homes and forests, and then there’s the economic apocalypse,” he said, adding that the disaster is “going to be a stab in the back for what remains of our economy.”

Le Grix de la Salle, whose family-owned Grand Verdus wine estate sits just 35 kilometers from the fire line on the opposite bank of the Garonne River, counts himself among the regional entrepreneurs bracing for severe losses. The French government’s official public appeal urging travelers to avoid the Gironde region has sparked outrage and anxiety among local business owners, who rely heavily on summer tourist traffic to prop up annual revenues.

Bordeaux’s iconic wine industry was already struggling long before the first wildfire ignited. Shifting consumer preferences have led to plummeting domestic wine consumption, as younger generations of French drinkers turn to alternative beverages, while intensifying global competition from new wine-producing regions has cut into export market share. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s punitive trade tariffs on European wine added another layer of financial stress for producers years ago, and broader global pressures have worsened the crisis.

“The wine business has been in crisis for several years now and it’s worsening with the geopolitical problems, the now widespread problems of inflation and the fact that wine is falling out of fashion among younger people,” Le Grix de la Salle explained. For the local industry, tourism had emerged as the only reliable growing segment of the market — a lifeline that the wildfires have now cut short. “Tourism was really the only dynamic part of the business that was still growing, both for us and, more generally, for Bordeaux wines,” he said. “And now this comes along as a brake.”

While the wildfires have only burned a small percentage of the Gironde region — which is the largest department in mainland France — the reputational damage to the area’s global brand as a top travel destination has already been extensive. Le Grix de la Salle questioned why regional and national authorities failed to prioritize protecting the tourism and cultural sectors that drive so much of the local economy. “How did they not think about protecting that sector? And the cultural sector, too. There is so much to visit in Bordeaux. There are so many museums, there are châteaux. It’s unbelievable,” he said.

Southwest France draws millions of domestic and international tourists each year, who come to explore its powdery Atlantic beaches, centuries-old winemaking châteaux, vast ancient pine forests, and the historic UNESCO World Heritage city of Bordeaux itself. The oyster-producing Arcachon Bay is a major draw for culinary travelers, but the wildfires and mass evacuation orders have turned many popular vacation hotspots into ghost towns this summer.

The regional chamber of commerce estimates that 39,000 businesses across Gironde have been impacted by the crisis, beyond the core wine and tourism sectors. The region is also a major global hub for defense and aerospace manufacturing, home to major industry players including Airbus, Dassault and Thales. Even before the wildfires broke out, regional businesses were reeling from skyrocketing energy costs that had already squeezed profit margins. A mid-July survey of regional enterprises found that 94% of respondents were already facing severe operational difficulties.

“We’re getting more and more calls from heads of small- and medium-sized businesses, tiny businesses and craft businesses that are calling for help and saying, ‘What am I going to do tomorrow?’” Seguin said. He also noted that commercial courts in Bordeaux and Libourne have already recorded a 37% increase in business liquidations when comparing June this year to June 2024.

Bordeaux Mayor Thomas Cazenave has pushed back against the national government’s appeal for travelers to avoid the region, stressing that the city itself has not faced evacuation orders and remains open for visitors. “The museums are open, the cafes and restaurants are open,” he said. “Life also goes on in our beautiful city.” Even so, local restaurateurs have already told the mayor that advance reservations have dropped dramatically, a sign that the reputational damage is already hitting local revenue.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Keaten from Lyon, France, and Leicester from Paris.