(MENAFN- Gulf Times) Firefighters across Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkiye and the Balkans were battling wildfires Tuesday, with another heatwave pushing temperatures above 40° Celsius across parts of Europe.
"Thanks to climate change, we now live in a significantly warmer world," Akshay Deoras, a research scientist at the meteorology department in Britain's University of Reading told AFP, adding that "many still underestimate the danger".
Global warming is giving the Mediterranean region hotter, drier summers, scientists say, with wildfires surging each year and sometimes whipping up into "whirls".
Temperature records were broken at four weather stations in southern France on Monday and three-quarters of the country was under heat alerts yesteay, with temperatures forecast to top 40° C in the Rhone Valley.
The Rhone department banned outdoor public events.
Temperatures started rising on Friday in France's second heatwave in just a few weeks and could remain high into next week, according to the national weather office Meteo-France.
That would make it a 12- to 14-day stretch of extreme heat.
"It's already too hot," said Alain Bichot, 34, as he sat at a cafe terrace early Tuesday morning in Dijon in eastern France. "I would rather just go to the office. At least there is air conditioning there."
"We are being cooked alive, this cannot continue," said a mayor in Portugal, Alexandre Favaios, as three fires burned.
On the outskirts of the Spanish capital Madrid, a fire killed a man working at a horse stable and reached some houses and farms but was contained Tuesday, regional authorities said.
A man also died in a fire in Albania, while a 61-year-old Hungarian seasonal worker is suspected to have died of heat-related causes while picking fruit in Lleida, in Spain's eastern Catalonia region.
In Montenegro's mountainous Kuci area, northeast of the capital Podgorica, one army soldier was killed and another badly injured when a water tanker they were operating overturned, the defence ministry said.
In Tarifa, on the southernmost tip of the Iberian peninsula, beachgoers and celebrity chef Jose Andres filmed flames and black smoke on the hills above whitewashed villas.
More than 2,000 people were evacuated from there as the fire – believed to have started in eucalyptus and pine forests – spread, officials said. Helicopters doused the blaze with seawater.
Authorities in Albania, Montenegro, Germany, Spain, Italy and France issued various types of heat warnings.
Eleven Italian cities, including Rome, Milan and Florence, were placed on red alert Tuesday due to the heat.
In Spain, temperatures reached 44° C in some regions, according to meteorology service AEMET, with minimal rainfall and windy conditions expected to exacerbate the fire risk.
Spain's interior ministry has put national services on standby, while almost 1,000 members of the armed forces are already supporting firefighting.
The country's rail operator said trains between northwestern Galicia and Madrid were halted because of a fire.
In Spain's largest region, Castile and Leon, more than 1,200 firefighters battled 32 wildfires Tuesday and thousands of residents were told to leave their homes.
Meanwhile, police said it had arrested a firefighter near the walled city of Avila northwest of Madrid, who had confessed to starting a fire two weeks ago because of the potential income from work extinguishing it.
In north Portugal, more than 1,300 firefighters backed by 16 aircraft were battling three large fires. One of them, in the Vila Real area, has been burning for 10 days.
"It's been 10 days that our population is in panic, without knowing when the fire will knock on their door," local mayor Favaios told broadcaster RTP, pleading for more government help.
In Albania, swathes of forest and farmland have been burnt by wildfires in the past week, and 30 separate fires continue to burn stoked by strong winds.
The defence ministry said four army helicopters and 80 soldiers were helping firefighters.
It also reported the death of a man suspected of having started in his backyard a fire that spread across a wider area.
In neighbouring Montenegro, authorities backed by helicopters from Serbia and Croatia contained a wildfire near Podgorica Tuesday, with the capital covered by smoke.
In Gornja Vrbica, residents helped firefighters stop a fire from reaching a local church and cemetery, Pobjeda daily reported.
More help was expected from Austria, Slovenia and Italy under the EU civil protection mechanism.
Dragana Vukovic, whose house in southeastern Piperi was reduced to ruins, told Reuters: "Everything that can be paid for and bought will be compensated, but the memories that burned in these four rooms and the attic cannot be compensated."
In Greece at Europe's southernmost tip, wildfires in some cases fanned by gale-force winds forced the evacuation of several villages and a hotel on the tourist islands of Zakynthos and Cephalonia in the Ionian Sea along with four other parts of the mainland.
A wildfire in the southern Greek region of Achaia forced residents of five villages near an industrial zone to flee, while 85 firefighters and 10 aircraft tried to stop a fire from reaching houses near the western Greek town of Vonitsa.
The picture was similar in Turkiye where a large blaze in the northwestern province of Canakkale burned for a second day, prompting the evacuation of hundreds of residents.

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