Forest fires: Fire inferno in Spain: search for missing people “from house to house”

In the devastating forest fire in southern Spain, both the extinguishing work and the search for numerous missing people kept the emergency services on their toes. According to the regional government of Andalusia, the tragedy claimed at least twelve lives – 23 people were still missing in the affected area around the municipalities of Los Gallardos and Bédar in the province of Almería in the evening. Before the kick-off of the World Cup quarter-final game in Los Angeles, with the European champions Spain After defeating Belgium, half a minute’s silence was held for the victims. According to authorities, Belgians are likely to be among the dead.

“What worries us at the moment are these 23 people who are considered missing. “But that doesn’t mean they’re dead,” regional president Juanma Moreno told reporters. Luis Ortega, the regional chief of the Guardia Civil (Civil Guard) police unit, assured that the missing people were being searched “from house to house”. The official was hopeful: “I don’t think we’ll discover many more bodies.”

Meanwhile, extinguishing work was made more difficult by high temperatures, which were around 35 degrees in the early evening, and by strong winds with gusts of around 40 kilometers per hour. More than 500 emergency services were supported in the evening by, among other things, 30 firefighting planes and helicopters as well as drones.

Brits and Belgians presumably among those killed

Many of those who died were trapped in the flames and burned to death in a vehicle and on the streets on Friday night, it said. According to the authorities, these are people who wanted to flee the flames, but chose the wrong escape route. Eight people were seriously injured, four of them seriously, it said.

Based on various indications, it is suspected that there are foreigners among the dead, possibly British and Belgians, but we have to wait for the victims to be identified, said Andalusian Health Minister Antonio Sanz. Moreno and mayors of affected towns stressed that disregard of calls to leave their homes, particularly by foreigners, likely contributed to the scale of the tragedy. The fire burned not far from popular Mediterranean beaches.

The fire broke out on Thursday evening in the 3,000-inhabitant community of Los Gallardos, located in the coastal hinterland northeast of the provincial capital Almería. The collapse of a power line is suspected to be the cause of the fire. By Friday evening, the flames had spread to almost 4,000 hectares, according to authorities. A motorway and several country roads were closed.

Evacuations saved “many lives”

More than 1,400 people from several towns were evacuated and taken to emergency tents. A campsite that had so far been spared from the flames was also evacuated as a precaution. 400 people, some of them elderly, were taken to safe places. “Many lives were saved through the evacuations,” said Health Minister Sanz.

Even if the affected region is not one of the best-known tourist hotspots in Spain: beaches like Playa de Mojácar are visited in the summer primarily by Spaniards, but according to authorities, also by tens of thousands of foreign tourists, especially from Great Britain. Belgium and visited France. Thousands of Brits also live in Almería.

Spain, but also its Iberian neighbor Portugal and other European countries have been hit by a series of forest fires for weeks. Since the beginning of the year, large-scale fires have already destroyed more than 57,000 hectares of land in Spain alone, data from the European Commission’s Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) shows.

© dpa-infocom, dpa:260710-930-367878/1