Friday 31 August 2012

"Spanish wildfire reaches Belgium"

From the BBC:

A huge wildfire started by a carelessly discarded cigarette in the wealthy resort of Marbella on Spain's Costa del Sol on Wednesday finally crossed the Pyreness last night, devouring Andorra in fifteen minutes flat. It has spent the day ripping through western France, where the authorities have evacuated millions of people.

Flames reached the town Bouillon on the Belgian-French border earlier this afternoon. Evacuations were ordered from Granada, Madrid, Saragossa and Pamplona in Spain and Toulouse, Limoghes, Orleans, Paris and Reims in France.

Some 300,000 British expats were among the evacuees, but the UK said they had now left evacuation centres. The British Consulates in Madrid and Paris said they had either been relocated with friends or had gone back to their smouldering ruins in Spain or France.

The fate of Portugal is as yet unknown as telephone contact has been lost. Dutch authorities are undecided whether to breach their own flood defences or not and said they would keep the situation under review.

4 comments:

Leg-iron said...

Well that's what you get when you allow free movement between countries. Spanish fires have as much right to burn Belgium as any locally-started fires.

Good thing we've goat a big moat around us.

Mark Wadsworth said...

LI, well no, under EU free movement laws, east europeans will be allowed to smuggle it into the UK on the back of a lorry or it will make its own way through the Channel Tunnel.

Lola said...

Phew. It missed us because the continent is cut off by the English Channel.

James Higham said...

The things one never realizes are going on.