France sends water bombers to tackle fire outside Paris
More than 400 French firefighters worked through the night to contain the wildfire in the historic Fontainebleau forest south of Paris; authorities sent two water bomb planes to fight the fire as a heatwave gripped Western Europe.
The fire broke out alongside a highway near Fontainebleau, which is home to one of France’s best-known royal palaces and once served as the autumnal residence and hunting lodge of past monarchs.
Towards midnight, under the influence of hot winds, the flames burned more than 800 hectares of land.
The fire, just 70 kilometers from Paris, caused the closure of the A6 motorway connecting Paris to Lyon and the south. Small-scale fires in the region also disrupted high-speed train services.
“The fight continues today,” the French fire service said on X.
Locals were warned that Canadair planes would have to take water from the River Seine, which runs through the center of Paris.
European countries are worried about increasingly frequent heat waves and record-breaking temperatures. Most scientists say the fires are caused by climate change and that much of continental Europe is dry.
Fires have already ravaged parts of France, Spain, Portugal and Greece, burning thousands of hectares.
The death toll in the fire that ravaged Spain’s southeastern province of Almeria rose to 13 over the weekend after a 93-year-old British woman died of burns.
Western Europe is in the grip of its third prolonged spell of baking heat this summer.
A heat wave in late June likely killed thousands of people, with more than 10,000 deaths reported in countries. There were power outages, schools were closed and temperature records were broken in France, Spain and Britain.
“It’s unusual to have this kind of excess at this time of year. It’s really high,” said Lasse Vestergaard, chief physician at Denmark’s Statens Serum Institute, which hosts EuroMOMO, a Europe-wide death tracking system.
“It is difficult to explain these high death rates by anything other than extreme heat,” Vestergaard told Reuters. he said.
