Photos| Fires in France and Spain are out of control… Europe deploys 7 firefighting planes

The fires burning in Spain and France continue to spiral out of control on Saturday, forcing the authorities to evacuate more than 250,000 people in the vicinity of the major French city of Bordeaux and in the vicinity of Madrid, where Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez stressed that the priority is “saving lives.”
Dark gray smoke covers the sky of the Spanish capital, and fires have consumed up to 25,000 hectares to the west of it.
A thick layer of black ash can be seen on the roofs of houses sloping north of the city center, while the smell of smoke spreads, forcing residents to close their windows.

Fires in Madrid

Firefighting teams battled “the worst fire in history” in the region throughout the night, according to local authorities.
“There are fires every summer,” said Mar Nicolas, head of the town of Brunet, which is close to towns that have been evacuated or affected by fires, but “this fire was horrific.”
The Ministry of the Interior announced that the number of people evacuated due to fires in the Madrid region exceeded 70,000 people, an increase of 25,000 from the number announced earlier.
The local government also reported that more than 1,200 elderly and disabled people were evacuated on Friday from medical institutions and nursing homes in the Madrid region.

High relative humidity

The head of the local authority, Francisco Martín Aguirre, warned that Saturday would be “difficult” due to irregular winds, but he pointed out that with the rise in “relative humidity” and “low temperatures, there is now a real opportunity to confront this fire with good chances of success.”
On Friday, two forest fires merged to form a massive fire that was about to merge in turn with a third fire in the Castille-y-Leon region.
France is also witnessing severe fires, and Prime Minister Sebastien Le Cornu called for an emergency crisis meeting on Saturday, with the deployment of an A400M military transport plane equipped with airdrop equipment to help fight the fires, after it was not scheduled to be sent before the end of July until its preparation was completed.

Fires in France

French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez reported that 167,000 people had been evacuated in the country due to fires near the city of Bordeaux and the Gironde region in the southwest of the country, in addition to 30,000 in the Landes region, also located in the southwest.
The authorities ordered all residents of the tourist peninsula of Cap-Ferret near Bordeaux to leave, whether by land or sea.
However, Thomas Cazeneuve, mayor of Bordeaux, where five to six thousand people were transferred from neighboring towns took refuge, said that evacuating the city is “not on the table” currently, despite the fires approaching tens of kilometers away from it.
The European Union deployed four aircraft in Spain and three in France, according to what the European Commission reported.