MORE THAN 4,000 people, many of them foreign tourists, were evacuated from their homes, hotels and apartments as forest fires swept across the island of La Palma in the Canaries over the weekend.
One of the smallest and greenest of the Canary Islands, La Palma is famous for its attractive wooded mountains. The fire broke out late on Friday night and, fanned by high winds, waged out of control all weekend.
Five hundred firefighters fought the blaze with hydroplanes and helicopters joining in the task by first light. Reinforcements of two hydroplanes and helicopters and more firefighters were brought in from neighbouring islands of Grand Canaria, Tenerife and Lanzarote.
The recently formed Military Emergency Unit, with specially trained troops and sophisticated firefighting equipment, arrived from the mainland yesterday afternoon.
They are working at full strength since fires in Catalonia, Aragon and the Gredos mountains near Madrid have been brought under control, but still not extinguished. Their task is being hampered by winds of up to 80km/h, temperatures of almost 40 degrees and tinder dry land.
The steep and rugged terrain of La Palma made it difficult for fighters to reach the heart of the fires and by midday yesterday, more than 2,000 hectares of the island’s woodland had been destroyed.
Officials ordered a group of firefighters to temporarily abandon their fight near in the south of La Palma yesterday afternoon as the flames spread out of control putting their lives at risk.
Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who is beginning his holidays on the island of Lanzarote this weekend, left his family and flew to La Palma to support the firefighters and see the devastation for himself.
This is proving to be one of the worst summers for wildfires for many years, with almost 75,000 hectares of agricultural and woodland, hillsides and national parks destroyed – most of it over the past two weeks.
Eleven people, nine of them firefighters, have died in the fires across Spain this summer. The first two were killed in June when their helicopter crashed as they dropped water on flames; four more died and two others were critically injured last month – one of the injured died three days later and the other is still in intensive care.
Authorities issued a heartrending recording of the last desperate words of these six firemen begging: “Get us out of here!”, but their colleagues were unable to reach them before the flames surrounded their fire truck in the Horta San Joan National Park, near Zaragoza.
Two more were killed when their vehicles crashed as they fought fires, while two civilians, one an elderly man still in his home 100km from Madrid, died before they could escape the flames.
Some of the fires are thought to have been deliberately started and 59 people have so far been detained and accused of arson. There are suspicions that the fires last week near Mojacar, in the south of Spain, were also caused by arsonists as there were at least seven separate areas burning at the same time.
Tesni del Amo, an Irish resident of Mojacar, escaped with her two young daughters as flames surrounded their hilltop house. “It was terrifying, just like a blazing inferno,” she said.