The fire which started on Thursday about a hundred kilometers north of Madrid, and ravaged 30,000 hectares, is “one of the most complex” in the modern history of Spain with 600 firefighters and soldiers mobilized, regional authorities alerted on Tuesday.
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The forest fire in the province of Guadalajara, considered the largest of the year in the country, is seriously worrying the authorities as a new heat wave begins on Tuesday, favoring devastating fires.
AFP
A thick plume of smoke rose Tuesday afternoon from the mountains surrounding the village of Tamajon, where a fire command post was set up, a few kilometers from the fire, noted an AFP journalist. In the sky, water bombing helicopters followed one another to put out the flames.
“It led to the largest deployment (of firefighters) in the history of the region, of the army emergency unit and the largest overall deployment of air assets,” noted the regional president of Castile-La Mancha, Emiliano García-Page.
AFP
During the night from Monday to Tuesday, 600 personnel were mobilized and “up to 29 air assets” were used “simultaneously”, he said after an emergency meeting, saying however “starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel” after days of fighting the flames, but “without declaring victory”.
According to the authorities, this fire is complex, because it broke out in an area almost empty of population, particularly arid with a lot of brush left abandoned, facilitating its rapid spread.
AFP
The fire burned “30,000 hectares,” said the Minister of Ecological Transition, Sara Aagesen, who went to Tamajón.
The fire extinction and prevention services (Infocam) clarified Tuesday morning on the social network
The inhabitants of fourteen other localities were confined, they specified, and 1,200 people evacuated, with no known victims at this stage.
According to Emiliano García-Page, firefighters managed to “practically stop” the advance of the fire towards the town of Soria (40,000 inhabitants), in the neighboring region of Castile and Leon.
Spain has just experienced one of the deadliest fires in its recent history, a forest fire in Andalusia (south) on July 9, killing 13 people and ravaging 7,000 hectares.
The country has experienced increasingly long and frequent heat waves in recent years, with temperatures well above 40°C, creating conditions favorable to devastating fires.
“We are going through particularly complex weeks and the risk of fire remains very high,” government spokesperson Elma Saiz warned at a press conference on Tuesday.
