A firefighting aircraft begins its run dropping retardant on Monday on a fire in a forest in Saint-Jean-d'Illac, about 10 miles west of Bordeaux in France's Gironde region. Photo by Laurent Perpigna/EPA
July 28 (UPI) -- Firefighters continued to duel with massive wildfires in France's Gironde region on Tuesday and at least 63,000 people in Spain were evacuated from areas burning near Madrid as an extreme heat wave, the fourth of the summer, took hold across southwestern Europe.
French President Emmanuel Macron said the country was facing its "most severe" crisis since World War II while Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez described the wildfires ravaging his country as "the most painful expression of the climate emergency."
While the main fires in the southwest Gironde region, near Bordeaux, and west of Madrid, did not worsen overnight, according to local authorities, temperatures forecast to reach as high as 40 degrees Celsius prompted the European Forest Fires Information System to issue a "very extreme conditions" for fire alert covering France and Spain through Wednesday.
Firefighters in Gironde were working with military engineers to try to contain the flames with fire breaks as evacuations continued, with another 4,000 people ordered to leave Lacanau -- a popular coastal holiday spot -- bringing to 224,000 the number of people forced to flee the region.
