Europe’s extreme heatwave sparks wildfires from Spain to Uk

Last night, a ring of fire was swiftly advancing towards homes dotted across the hills of Andalusia, forcing residents to evacuate in the knowledge that at least a dozen lives have been lost so far. The flames tore across arid woodland and scrub, fanned by high winds. Europe is warming faster than any other continent, making fires like this far more likely. But firefighters stopped the flames from crossing a highway beyond which lie Spanish coastal towns. Still, thousands of acres have been burned to a cinder, and all those known to have died did so trying to escape in their cars. At least four are believed to be British, fleeing from the village of Bedar. Police say they'd gone door to door, urging everyone to stay put, but some drove towards the flames and never came out. Another eight people abandoned their cars, and their remains were discovered nearby. Whatever the police advised, this home in the sun was turned into a death trap, and the decision whether to stay or to leave had to be made fast. I was just watching the telly and I thought, that wind's gone up, so I opened it to have a look and I seen a big black cloud, big one, I thought it was a cloud. I thought, got to shut the door then in five minutes, bang, bang, bang. Just get your money, get your cards and I'll come out, yep, you've got to go. I'm driving through flames, actually flames, and I thought, well, I can't stop, I just got to go, you know. And it was eerie because all of a sudden, all of a sudden I came out of the flames, and it was all bright sunshine, it was like surreal, you know, it's ridiculous. You can see from this aerial footage the reality of a changing climate. There's plenty of vegetation on the hillsides after a wet winter and spring, and that provides fuel for fires in increasingly hot summers like this one, which can reach temperatures of 40 degrees. Those who died did so in such intense heat, that their remains have been boxed up and sent to a lab in Madrid, where DNA testing will confirm the identities of those killed. Spain dealt with record fires last summer, so it was better prepared for this one, but the frightening vision of summers to come is already here. Here there are warnings of a high risk of wildfires across England and Wales this weekend, due to the hot weather and dry conditions. At Tintwhistle Moor in Derbyshire, fire crews are tackling a fire that's been burning since the 24th of June. Today the fire service urged people not to go walking in the exclusion zone around the area, as this prevents helicopters being used to drop water on the fire. Our North of England correspondent Clare Falun is at Tintwhistle now. And the fire here is absolutely still burning this evening. You can probably see just up on that hillside over there the smoke that's rising, but actually in the last hour or so things have improved quite a bit, and that's because the specialist helicopter that they can bring in has come back here to dump huge amounts of water over that hillside, and up until it arrived, as I say about an hour ago, we could see flames rising up from the ground as this line of smoke and fire moved down the hillside at really quite a fast rate. It's been two and a half weeks now since emergency crews were first called to this moorland fire, and we're told in that time it's burned its way through 2.6 million square metres of moorland. There have been periods when it's been contained as the fire service puts it, but in the last couple of days as we've had more hot weather with things still incredibly dry, hot spots have popped up again and have then started spreading, and that's something that was explained to me earlier by one of the senior firefighters here. The strong winds over the last three weeks and the warm weather haven't really made it any easier for us, based on how the wind and the strength of the wind has created the fanning of the flames, so to speak, and the development of the fire. The terrain is incredibly difficult due to it being quite illy, steep in areas and gullies, it's these incredibly difficult conditions we're experiencing. Another thing that makes this kind of fire in this kind of area incredibly difficult to tackle is how much peat there is underneath the ground, and that means the fire doesn't just spread through the vegetation, it spreads underground through the peats as well and it can pop up in fires, and that's been a really big concern here, trying to stop that fire spreading into the areas of trees. But with this risk warning about wildfires in many other places too, the concern is this could also happen in other places.