LA OROTAVA, SPAIN (AFP) – Firefighters made gains in their battle against a vast wildfire on Tenerife yesterday after better-than-expected overnight weather helped them keep the blaze from destroying homes on the Spanish holiday island, regional officials said.
The huge fire broke out late Tuesday in a mountainous northeastern area, quickly morphing into the Canary Islands’ biggest-ever.
So far the blaze, which has a perimeter of 70 kilometres, has burned through 8,400 hectares, or just over four per cent of Tenerife’s overall surface area, forcing more than 12,000 people to flee their homes.
Despite expectations of a difficult night, things went “much better than expected”, Canary Islands leader Fernando Clavijo said.
“We warned of a complex situation, with rising temperatures and wind… and it’s true the night started very hard with many calls saying the fire was very close to people’s homes,” he told reporters yesterday morning.
But the firefighters “worked very intensively” and got through the night without losing a single home to the blaze, he said, describing it as “almost a miracle”.
Technical head of the operation Montse Roman said overnight operations were “mainly focused on defending infrastructure and homes on the northern flank of the fire”, confirming there had “not been any more evacuations or confinement orders”.
Some 20 aerial units joined the battle against the blaze yesterday alongside two more coordination units. Late Saturday, Clavijo said the wildfire had so far displaced “a total of 12,279 people”, citing figures from the Guardia Civil police.
As the fire spread down the mountainside towards the northern town of La Matanza de Acentejo on Saturday afternoon, Candelaria Bencomo Betancor, a farmer in her 70s, looked on in anguish. “The fire is close to our farm, we’ve got trucks, vans, chickens, everything… it’s a business that is going well but if the fire comes, it will totally ruin us,” she told AFPTV, on the verge of tears.
So far the fire has affected 11 municipalities on Tenerife, the largest of the seven Canary Islands, with the emergency services saying air quality was affected across much of the island “due to the smoke generated by the fire”.
Pedro Martinez, who is in charge of firefighting efforts, said the blaze was “behaving like a sixth-generation wildfire” – a term referring to a mega forest fire, and efforts to tackle the flames were being hampered by the huge clouds of smoke and the wind.
