Firefighters were making progress in quenching forest fires that have ravaged parts of Portugal and France, officials said on Friday, as Spain faced a rash of possibly deliberate blazes.
The situation had calmed down on the frontline of fires in northern Portugal and on the island of Madeira, where three people died this week in the flames.
“Weather conditions improved overnight, the wind is a bit calmer and we have been able to make progress,” Carlos Guerra, an official with the national civil protection authority, told Lusa news agency.
Photo: AP
The mercury on Thursday topped 38?C, the hottest temperature on Madeira since 1976, with winds gusting to 90kph.
On Friday, about 1,400 firefighters battled six major fires in northern Portugal, but they succeeded in halving the number of blazes, officials said.
Portugal has been aided by water bombers sent by Italy, Spain and Morocco, and on Friday it announced two more planes were coming from Russia.
In southern France, firefighters said that they had extinguished blazes that swept through more than 3,000 hectares north of Marseille for the previous two days as the Mistral wind that had fanned the flames dropped sharply.
Three houses, a restaurant and a car repair garage were gutted by fire and another 17 houses were damaged.
Prosecutors were investigating the cause of a fire in Vitrolles, north of Marseille, after a man was arrested near the outbreak when local residents said they saw him acting suspiciously.
French President Francois Hollande on Thursday said that authorities believe some of the fires were started deliberately.
He vowed that the perpetrators would be tracked down.
Likewise in Spain, officials on Friday said that over the past few days in Galicia on the Atlantic coast, the number of fires had increased in a way that raised suspicions they were deliberately set.
“We cannot confirm it until police establish the cause [of the fires], but we know that in the last few days, different incendiary devices have been discovered onsite,” a source in the regional government told reporters.
In all, firefighters in Spain were battling 15 blazes, which have ravaged more than 5,800 hectares in five days.
Five of the fires were still advancing on Friday, including three that threatened homes.
A 56-year-old woman has been arrested suspected of lighting about 15 fires that were quickly extinguished near her home in a village in Galicia since July 18, the civil guard said.
She is suspected of having placed decorative candles in the woods to start blazes, a civil guard member said.
The fires sweeping through Galicia’s forested mountains are damaging to the region’s logging industry.
Its federation issued a statement on Thursday calling for “zero tolerance” and severe punishment for anyone found responsible for igniting the flames.
Separately, a fire that has destroyed more than 4,800 hectares of pine woods on La Palma, the most northwesterly of the Canary Islands, was brought under control after eight days. The blaze claimed the life of a park ranger.
A German man who allegedly sparked the fire by burning toilet paper has been remanded in custody.
In France’s Pyrenees region near the Spanish border, a fire that erupted on Thursday forced the evacuation of 60 people as the flames edged dangerously close to a village, police said.
“The smoke was so thick that we couldn’t see the village, which is just a kilometer from here,” local tourist official Nathalie Dephino said.
The town’s deputy mayor, Patricia Vignon, on Friday said that the fires had been put out and air tankers had dumped water on the scorched areas to ensure they did not re-ignite.
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