The forest fire that has been ravaging the island of Tenerife for a week is still not under control but “the worst is over” advanced the president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, Monday, August 21. “Let’s hope the weather helps us so that we can definitely consider the fire stabilized in the next few hours, the next few days”declared for his part the outgoing Socialist Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, during a brief visit to the area on Monday.
The next few hours will be “very important”, he insisted during this short speech to the press, while the forecasts suggest a difficult night with wind and rising temperatures. A fourth heat wave is expected to sweep Spain this week. Spain’s weather service said temperatures would gradually rise to 40 degrees in parts of the country on Wednesday and Thursday. In Tenerife, the agency predicts average maximum temperatures of 30 degrees.
“We are concentrating our efforts on two fronts, in particular in the south-east which is very difficult to access, as it is made up of ravines and steep cliffs”, explained to Spanish television, Victoria Palma, technical adviser to the “Cabildo” (government) of Tenerife, describing a “unprecedented fire which has spread very quickly since the beginning, due to successive heat waves”. More than 400 firefighters and security guards were mobilized to fight the flames.
No injuries have yet been reported
This fire is considered the most important that the archipelago has known. The fire, which broke out on Tuesday August 15 in a mountainous region in the northeast of the island, has already devoured more than 13,300 hectares over a perimeter of almost 90 km, or about 6% of the area of the island. island, and forced more than 13,000 people to flee. He is of a “scale and power that we have never faced”, in the words of Mr. Clavijo.
On Saturday, the head of the forest services, Pedro Martinez, reported that despite the magnitude of the blaze and thanks to the intervention of the firefighters, no injuries had yet been reported and no house had burned down so far. : “A real miracle”underlined the regional president.
During the night from Sunday to Monday, the Emergency Military Unit (UME), the Forest Fire Reinforcement Brigades (BRI) as well as the regional intervention teams concentrated their efforts on the southern sector, more precisely between the localities of Arafo and Candelaria, where a line of defense has been set up to protect in particular the area of the Teide observatory where the telescopes of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) are located. Monday morning, the inhabitants of these two communities were able to return to their homes.
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