The first victim of the massive fires in France and Spain, which have seen almost 300,000 people flee their homes has been found in a car in the Spanish town of Manises, the Valencia fire brigade said
The first person to die from the wildfires raging in Spain and France has been discovered today as over 270,000 people fled their homes.
The body of a man was found in a car in a ravine in the Spanish town of Manises after a forest fire burned through the area, firefighters said.
Smoke and ash are currently raining down on Spain’s capital as huge wildfires burn to the west with the president there declaring a national emergency and warning of “complex hours ahead”.
Meanwhile in France some 500 military personnel were deployed yesterday to help combat the blazes with a further 1,500 to be sent in tonight.
The inferno in the Gironde region in Western France has been raging since Wednesday, with the flames reportedly moving dangerously close to the nearby city of Bordeaux.
A ‘crisis meeting’, which was held at the armed forces headquarters in Paris earlier today with French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez telling reporters a military transport aircraft will join 18 other water- and retardant-dropping planes and helicopters fighting the fire.
With the wind direction shifting, officials fear the flames are moving dangerously close to the nearby city of Bordeaux with crews frantically digging trenches, using retardants and taking other steps to block it, Nunez said.
Authorities have ordered people between the fire and Bordeaux to evacuate, including from parts of the city’s western suburbs and other towns and villages. “Our priority is clear: protecting human lives,” Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu posted on X, adding that evacuation orders “must be respected without delay.”
Some 197,000 people have been evacuated from south-west France amid a blaze approaching Bordeaux as the fire grows so large it has begun generating its own weather events. A rare pyrocumulonimbus – a thunderstorm caused by a large fire – was seen for the first time ever in France on Friday.
In Madrid the fires are in the wider region far outside the city centre – and authorities are battling to stop different fires merging. But the flames have already shut down a facility for US space agency Nasa 37 miles west of the Spanish capital. The city’s regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso said it was the “worst fire in the history of the region.”
In Spain at least 70,000 people have been evacuated with 20,000 told to remain indoors.
Other European nations are stepping into help, with Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, Croatia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia already providing water-dumping planes and helicopters to the Spanish and French fire fronts.
