Canada is not done with the fires ravaging its territory. Authorities in western British Columbia urged tens of thousands of residents to take evacuation orders seriously on Saturday, August 19.
“Extreme and fast-moving” wildfires, whose intensity and frequency are increased by global warming, are indeed threatening large parts of the scenic Okanagan Valley, including the city of Kelowna. The situation in this popular area for boaters and hikers is changing very quickly, said Bowinn Ma, the province’s emergency manager.
Canada: evacuation of thousands of people in the Far North in the face of fires
© / afp.com/Cléa PÉCULIER, Sabrina BLANCHARD
About 30,000 people have been ordered to evacuate, and another 36,000 are on high alert and ready to flee. “We insist on the absolute importance of immediately following evacuation orders,” she said at a press conference. “It’s a matter of life and death for the people who are in these properties, but also for the relief workers who are sometimes forced to come back and ask people to leave.”
In the Kelowna area, the situation is also critical on the other side of Lake Okanagan, in West Kelowna (more than 30,000 inhabitants) where “a significant number” of houses have burned down, according to authorities. Kelowna, a city of 150,000 people, suffocated by thick smoke, is the latest urban center to fall victim to the dramatic wildfires across Canada, where millions of hectares have burned.
Australian and Brazilian firefighters as reinforcements
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he spoke with British Columbia Premier David Eby about the “rapidly evolving and incredibly devastating wildfire situation”. He promised federal resources. Firefighters from Australia, Mexico, Brazil and Costa Rica, as well as eastern Canada, are helping British Columbia battle the blazes.
Flames rage through the hills of West Kelowna in British Columbia, Canada, August 17, 2023
© / afp.com/Darren HULL
The fires are also affecting northern Canada. Some 40 flights carrying about 3,500 passengers from Yellowknife have arrived in Calgary, officials said in the city, which has made nearly 500 hotel rooms available.
More than a thousand fires are currently ravaging Canada from east to west, including more than 230 in the Northwest Territories and more than 370 in British Columbia. The country is experiencing a record-breaking wildfire season this year: 14 million hectares – about the size of Greece – have burned, double the last record dating back to 1989.
“It’s a devastating fire”
In Spain, the violent winds and high temperatures again make it very difficult, this Sunday August 20 at dawn, the task of firefighters on the tourist island of Tenerife. The Canary archipelago is facing the worst forest fire in the region’s history.
“It’s a devastating fire, a fire on a completely different scale, a scale never seen before in the Canary Islands,” said the head of government of Tenerife, Rosa Davila. The fire, with a perimeter of 70 km, has so far ravaged 8,400 hectares, or more than 4% of the total surface of the island.
On Saturday evening, the president of the Canary Islands regional government, Fernando Clavijo, indicated that “a total of 12,279 people” have been evacuated so far, citing figures from the Guardia Civil.
A few hours earlier, the emergency services had reported on the social network X (ex-Twitter) “provisional estimates suggesting that more than 26,000 people have been evacuated”. Regional authorities, who had relayed this figure, explained that it was “based on census figures” of areas subject to evacuation orders. “Last night was very complicated and tonight will probably be just as complicated, if not worse,” Fernando Clavijo said on Saturday night.
The “most complicated” fire in 40 years
Strong gusts of wind and higher than expected temperatures had already facilitated, during the night from Friday to Saturday, the spread of the fire which broke out on Tuesday evening August 15 in a mountainous part of the northeast of the island. The fire has so far affected eleven municipalities on the island of Tenerife, the largest of the Canaries, which covers a total of 203,400 hectares.
The island has experienced larger fires in terms of burned area, especially in 2007, but the weather conditions and topography of this one made Fernando Clavijo say on Thursday that the archipelago was facing its “most complicated fire “for 40 years.
The head of the forest services, Pedro Martinez, spoke on Saturday of an inferno “behaving like a sixth generation forest fire”, in reference to its size. “The fire is beyond our ability to put it out, maybe not in all areas, but in a large part of them,” he continued.
An out of control fire rages on the wooded slopes in La Matanza on the island of Tenerife in the Spanish Canary archipelago, August 19, 2023
© / afp.com/DESIREE MARTIN
The fire generated a large cloud of smoke eight kilometers high, visible on satellite images. He passed the summit of Teide, a volcano overlooking the island and the highest point in Spain with its 3,715 meters of altitude.
This fire occurs between two heat waves on an island which has many dry areas, which increases the risk of fires. In 2022, 300,000 hectares were destroyed by more than 500 fires in Spain, a record in Europe, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis). Nearly 76,000 hectares have already burned in 2023 in this country on the front line in the face of global warming.
The toll is also very heavy in the United States. In Hawaii, fires on the island of Maui killed 111 people and destroyed the city of Lahaina, the former capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii. It is already the deadliest fire in more than a century in the country. These fires caused thousands of evacuations and forced some residents to throw themselves into the sea to escape the flames.