France: Macron holds crisis talks as wildfires spread
Deutsche Welle · LC · trust 65/100
As France and Spain battle some of their worst wildfires in years, the French government is holding a crisis meeting. A fire-generated storm cloud over France has added to fears of more outbreaks.
https://p.dw.com/p/5HofT The firefighters' union said employees were being put at risk by a lack of equipment Image: Romain Perrocheau/AFP/dpa/picture alliance Advertisement French President Emmanuel Macron convened an interministerial crisis meeting on Monday morning as fires continued to burn across several parts of the country, the Elysee Palace said.
Both France and Spain are continuing to battle vast wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of homes, forced mass evacuations and generated extreme weather conditions.
In the particularly hard-hit southwestern Gironde region, fire has destroyed 240 homes since Wednesday. Around 170 properties were damaged in the municipality of Le Porge alone, deputy mayor Jean Lajzerowicz told the AFP news agency.
The blaze has injured 84 firefighters. Some 2,500 firefighters, 1,500 military personnel and 1,200 police officers and gendarmes have been deployed.
The CFDT firefighters' union said personnel were being sent into dangerous conditions without sufficient protection from carcinogenic smoke and particles. It called for new filtering hoods to be issued more widely and said at least four firefighters had required treatment in hyperbaric chambers after suffering carbon monoxide poisoning.
Residents near Bordeaux evacuated from encroaching wildfire To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video
The fire also produced a pyrocumulonimbus, a towering fire-generated cloud that can ignite further blazes, creating its own winds, lightning and, in some cases, tornadoes.
France's national firefighters federation said the phenomenon had never previously been recorded in the country.
The wildfires around Bordeaux in southwestern France have dealt a sudden blow to an already struggling region, French Finance Minister Roland Lescure said on Monday.
In neighboring Spain , national civil protection chief Virginia Barcones described the fire around the city of Avila as a "monster."
"We are dealing with a perimeter of 280 kilometers encompassing 77,000 hectares," Barcones told state broadcaster TVE on Sunday.
Around 75,000 people have been evacuated from the Madrid region, Avila, Toledo, and Castellon in the eastern Valencia region.
Authorities said on Monday that the fires were "not yet under control," although they planned to reopen a campsite from which 4,500 people had been evacuated and allow some elderly residents to return home in another area if conditions permitted.
Winds were pushing fires near Madrid southward and away from the capital for the time being, but were forcing further evacuations from villages in their path.
A fire near Valencia killed one person on Saturday, the only civilian death reported so far. Two firefighters died near Bordeaux in France last Tuesday.
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