Wildfires Spread Across Europe as Fontainebleau Is Evacuated
A wildfire tore through the historic Fontainebleau forest south of Paris, forcing evacuations and disrupting road and rail as it spread across more than 1,300 hectares, in France’s third heatwave in three months. In Spain, ten people were still missing after a southern wildfire that killed thirteen, with extreme heat, drought and wind driving fires across the country and beyond. It is the same heat dome that is baking Britain, now settled over much of the continent.
A fire in Fontainebleau — a royal forest for centuries, an hour from the French capital — is the kind of scene that makes the abstraction of a warming climate concrete, and it is being repeated across southern and western Europe in a summer of successive heatwaves that dry the land to tinder. The cross-border firefighting effort, aircraft and crews moving between countries, is the measure of a continent stretching systems built for a cooler age. The human cost accumulates twice over, in the immediate danger of the flames and the slower toll of the heat, which has already killed thousands across Europe this summer. For the many British holidaymakers heading to France, Spain and Greece this month, the fires are a direct concern, and for a country under its own alerts they are a preview. Watch the containment of the French and Spanish fires, the confirmed death toll, and whether the heat breaks across the continent this week.