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ONE PERSON WAS killed and three injured Sunday as firefighters battled wildfires across Spain, authorities said, the latest victims in a sweltering summer of forest blazes.
The victim died fighting a blaze in woods near the southeastern city of Alicante, while there and on the Canary Islands aircraft dumped water on the hillsides to douse flames that have driven thousands from their homes.
As the fires on the Canaries raged along with smaller blazes around the country, the latest major blaze broke out north of Alicante in the Torre de les Macanes pine woods where the firefighter died, the regional government said.
The fire “is still active in an area of adult pines,” a spokeswoman for the emergency services told AFP on Sunday evening.
Regional government official Serafin Castellano said authorities evacuated 130 children from a camp in the area as a precaution.
On the Atlantic islands of La Gomera and Tenerife, part of the Canaries archipelago, fires that have ravaged thousands of hectares of land burned on out of control Sunday, authorities said.
On la Gomera, “work is under way to prevent the fire advancing towards the populated areas of Vallehermoso” in the north and further into Garajonay National Park, a Unesco World Heritage Site, the regional government said in a statement.
Elderly villagers on La Gomera had spent the night in hotels and student halls after more than 4,700 people were evacuated since Friday.
Apolonia Garcia Castaneda, an 83-year-old mother of 10 who was evacuated overnight on La Gomera, said she had to leave behind her chickens, sheep and crops as well as her dog.
“I haven’t been able to sleep. I rested a bit, but the fear doesn’t go easily,” she said.
The flames have charred more than 600 hectares (1,500 acres) on La Gomera and some 370 hectares on Tenerife since they revived on Friday after devastating 3,000 hectares earlier in the week, the regional government said.
Since the fire first started a week ago, a total of nearly 800 hectares have been burned inside the Garajonay reserve, home to rare subtropical forests, it said.
Some residents were allowed to return to their villages on Tenerife, the regional government statement said, but residents of several villages on La Gomera faced a second night in their emergency lodgings.
The head of the Canary Islands emergency services Juan Manuel Santana told a news conference that high temperatures and low humidity on Sunday made it harder to control the blaze.
Driest winter in 70 years
Spain is at particular risk of fires this summer after suffering its driest winter in 70 years. Temperatures have topped 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in recent days.
Last month four people were killed by a wildfire in the northern Catalonia region.
In Vallehermoso, 150 people who fled nearby villages overnight spent the night in hotels and school accommodation. Many others were housed by friends and relatives.
“Most of the people we’ve taken in are over 65 or children,” said Maria Dolores Arteaga Amaro, a social worker looking after the evacuees.
“Most require regular medication, so a volunteer nurse has worked around the clock taking care of them.”
The Spanish government says 132,300 hectares of land have been burnt so far this year and blazes have broken out across the country in recent days.
On the mainland, officials in the northwestern Galicia region said that among a series of wildfires there, the biggest had ravaged 1,200 hectares.
Several other fires were reported, from Catalonia in the north to the Cabaneros national park in central Spain and another near the Donana park in Andalucia in the south.
Meanwhile in Greece, rainfall overnight helped hundreds of firefighters to bring a blaze under control near Mount Athos, another World Heritage site housing a remote monastic community.
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40% of people who live in the USA are suffering from a chronic illness of one sort or another. Think on that. That’s nearly half of the population of the USA. Pesticides, unlabled GMO foods, food riven with additives, growth hormones, ammonia, have a huge bearing on that figure of 40%. When Monsanto can place its people in the Supreme Court, and on the board of the FDA there will never be any chance of that number of 40% decreasing. The number will only rise.
@Dave Doyle: Sedentary lifestyles and too much calorie-laden, salty processed food is the cause of those problems.
Glyphosate is used just as widely in Europe as it is in the US, so there’s very little basis for your above post wrt. pesticides.
@Dave Doyle: Likely nothing to do with Monsanto or Glyphosate but to do with the adulteration of the food chain with sulphite preservatives & sulphite colorants.
Sulphur dioxide & sulphites are the only one of 14 allergens that can be legally HIDDEN in food if the levels are below 10mg/kg or 10ml/l. Imagine if same rules applied to peanuts.
The sulphites are driving chronic inflammation which we suspect is exacerbating a newly defined disease called Mast Cell Activation Syndrome that may already be an epidemic in developed nations even Ireland. The disease is an immune disease likely triggered by environmental factors such as smog, diesel exhaust, of gassing polyurethane plastics and other household chemicals we assume are safe WD40, 3 in 1 oil, deodorant propellants….very long list.
Once the genie is out of the bottle, Mast Cells within the immune system start to misidentify threats and one threat it mis-identifies are sulphites in food which are now ubiquitous. Sulphites are used to cheat on shelf life and cheat on colour.
Acute exposure by thousands of personnel to vast amounts of known sensitizer chemicals at the Air Corps at Baldonnel has left a medical trail that will be very valuable to any scientist looking to get to the bottom of this problem. Young men suffered MCAS symptoms in late teens/early 20s when the measured profile of the illness in the USA is confined 80% to middle aged women.
Monsanto is a convenient bogie man but the answer is likely simpler and happening every time we eat breakfast, dinner and tea as well as nibbles and a glass of wine.
@Chemical Brothers: A well researched, reasonable and balanced response but you’re dealing with Journal prejudice where everybody goes off pushing their own little barrow.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is the primary agency of the European Union for risk assessments regarding food safety.
In October 2015, EFSA concluded that ‘glyphosate is unlikely to pose a hazard to humans and the evidence does not support classification with regard to its carcinogenic potential’.
@James Brady: Study after study has shown that is does cancer -Common weed killer glyphosate increases cancer risk by 41%, study says https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/14/health/us-glyphosate-cancer-study-scli-intl/index.html
Weedkiller glyphosate a ‘substantial’ cancer factor
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47633086
2 recent cases in US have been win by people who sued and win.
Have you ever wondered why cancer is skyrocketing why bees are dying etc
@GO GREEN: Jury Rules Against Bayer in California Glyphosate and Cancer Trial https://www.agriculture.com/news/crops/jury-rules-against-bayer-in-california-glyphosate-and-cancer-trial
@James Brady: that conlusion only came after the heavyweight German corporations got involved. The WHO has been compromised for a good few years now.
@Cormac Ó Braonáin: actually, the WHO considers that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic”, inline with findings from the IARC. It’s the EFSA, completely unrelated to the WHO, that is compromised.
@GO GREEN: But the resurges agreed that the findings are limited. Also it is unlikely to cause cancer when handling in a proper way. Everything can be harmful if not proper used.
“The plaintiff’s assumed technical knowledge does not excuse the lack of information on the product and its harmful effects – a farmer is not a chemist.”
French judges appear to show sense. The State Claims Agency has managed to successfully argue in an Irish Court that military aircraft mechanics in the Irish Air Corps with ZERO medical training were able to diagnose themselves with chemical injure thus starting the statute clock.
SCA have argued that an Air Corps technician going to an doctor asking did chemicals harm me and doctor saying maybe or maybe not means the technician had “knowledge” that the chemicals had harmed him.
Like I said the French judge appears to have displayed common sense against a formidable corporate foe.
have your say