Spain, France and other western European nations sweltered over the weekend under a blistering heat wave that has sparked forest fires and concerns that such early summer blasts of hot weather could now become the norm.
The weekend’s soaring temperatures were the peak of a heat wave this month in line with scientists’ predictions that such phenomena would now strike earlier in the year due to global warming.
The popular French southwestern seaside resort of Biarritz recorded its highest all-time temperature on Saturday afternoon of 42.9°C state forecaster Meteo France said as authorities urged vigilance from the central western coast down to the Spanish border.
Photo: AFP
Many parts of the region surpassed 40°C, although storms were expected on the Atlantic coastyesterday evening — the first signs that the stifling temperatures would “gradually regress to concern only the eastern part of the country,” the weather service reported.
The baking heat failed to put off heavy metal aficionados attending the Hellfest festival at Clisson on the outskirts of the western city of Nantes, where temperatures soared beyond 40°C.
Those who found the energy to headbang to the music were grateful for several water fountains on hand which sprayed them periodically.
Photo: AFP
Queues of hundreds of people and traffic jams formed outside aquatic leisure parks in France, with people seeing water as the only refuge from the devastating heat.
With the River Seine off limits to bathing, scorched Parisians took refuge in the city’s fountains. At Vincennes Zoo in the capital’s outskirts, shaggy-haired lions licked and pawed at frozen blood fed to them by zookeepers, who monitored the enclosure’s animals for signs of dehydration under the scorching sun.
“This is the earliest heat wave ever recorded in France” since 1947, said Matthieu Sorel, a climatologist at Meteo France, as June records fell in a dozen areas, leading him to call the weather a “marker of climate change.”
In a major incident in France, a fire triggered by the firing of an artillery shell in military training in the Var region of southern France was burning about 200 hectares of vegetation, local authorities said.
“There is no threat to anyone except 2,500 sheep who are being evacuated and taken to safety,” local fire brigade chief Olivier Pecot said.
The fire came from the Canjeurs military camp, the biggest such training site in Western Europe.
Fire services’ work was impeded by the presence of non-exploded munitions in the deserted area, but four Canadair planes were deployed to water bomb the fires.
Forest fires in Spain on Saturday had burned nearly 20,000 hectares of land in the northwest Sierra de la Culebra region.
The flames forced several hundred people from their homes, and 14 villages were evacuated.
Some residents were able to return on Saturday morning, but regional authorities said the fire “remains active.”
Firefighters were still battling blazes in several other regions, including woodlands in Catalonia. Temperatures above 40°C were forecast in parts of the country on Saturday — with highs of 43°C expected in the northeastern city of Zaragoza.
There have also been fires in Germany, where temperatures were forecast to go as high as 40°C on Saturday but only reached 36°C.
Several towns in northern Italy have announced water rationing and the Lombardy region might declare a state of emergency as a record drought threatens harvests.
Italy’s dairy cows were putting out 10 percent less milk, the main agricultural association, Coldiretti, said on Saturday.
With temperatures far above the cows’ “ideal climate” of 22°C to 24°C, animals were drinking up to 140 liters of water per day, double their normal intake, and producing less due to stress, it said.
“As a result of climate change, heat waves are starting earlier,” said Clare Nullis, a spokeswoman for the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
“What we’re witnessing today is unfortunately a foretaste of the future” if concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to rise and push global warming towards 2°C from pre-industrial levels, she added.
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