Fire without control in Gran Canaria | The fire …

More than 6,000 hectares burned, including part of a natural park, and 9,000 evacuees have already caused the fire that has declared north of the Spanish island of Gran Canaria , where nearly a thousand people work and fourteen air badets to avoid Let the flames reach the urban centers.

The fire, which was declared Saturday afternoon and covers a perimeter of 60 km, touches eight municipalities and has arrived at the Tamadaba Natural Park, northeast of the island, a native Canarian pine forest declared a biosphere reserve.

The fire is "an unprecedented environmental disaster on the island" that has affected more than 150 species of terrestrial plants endemic to this island territory, said the director of the Canarian Botanical Garden "Viera y Clavijo" to the EFE press agency, Julio Caujapé. The regional president of the Canary Islands, Ángel Victor Torres, added that the increase in the area burned was due to the entrance of the fire in the Tamadaba natural park, although it seems to have caused less damage than expected.

The Spanish Minister of Agriculture, Luis Planas, who is in Gran Canaria – one of the largest and most populated islands of the archipelago – said the next 48 hours would be crucial for the evolution of the fire. He said that climate change is generating more and more recurring extreme events, so it is necessary to fight against both this climate emergency and forest fires.

In this sense, he announced the arrival of a new generation UAV in the region, allowing to take live night images and know the exact situation on the ground. While for the air means means that the work in extinction at the present time a specialized aircraft in the coordination of air badets will be united, which will allow greater safety and efficiency in the water which is thrown into the fire.

This new fire comes to add to the two previous ones not yet extinct in Gran Canaria, although controlled. The largest of them has burned about 1,200 hectares of forest in the highest part of the island and forced to expel a thousand people from various places; and the other, to the northeast, burned 160 hectares of scrubland. However, none of them reached the scale of Gran Canaria in July 2007, which destroyed 16,000 hectares.

The authorities have indicated that temperatures will drop predictably in the next few hours and that the humidity will increase, which in principle will help extinguish the fire.

Spain suffers every summer the scourge of forest fires, aggravated in recent years by rising temperatures. From January 1 to August 11 this year, there were 8,302 fires, which burned a total of 57,697 hectares.