Between fires and drought, the scorching summer continues to rage in Europe

The record-breaking, scorching, dry summer continued to hit Europe on Monday. While the fires raging for four years near Athens, Greece, are still threatening, the French firefighters were trying to control the fire in the Var. For their part, England and Wales announced that they had experienced the driest month of July on record. France 24 takes stock of the situation.

While the fires in France seemed to calm down on Monday August 3, with the many people evacuated in Gironde continuing to return to their homes, it is now in Greece that the fire is raging, threatening for four days near Athens. At the same time, England and Wales announced their driest July on record.

Firefighters continue to battle to contain outbreaks of fire in Var and Gironde, as well as near Carcassonne, in Aude, where a fire declared in the afternoon is now “fixed”.

In Gironde, a sign of the clear improvement on the ground, the victims of Porge – the town most affected by the megafire, were able to return to this ghost village on Monday. 183 houses out of 240 burned there.

In the Var, the fire, which started on Friday, is contained but is still not fixed at this stage. Firefighters are therefore showing “extreme vigilance” to tame “limited” resumptions and reactivations of the fire, which could still be fanned by gusts of wind in the coming days. The flames have already covered around 1,850 hectares and threatened several villages. But the residents, evacuated for part of the weekend, were able to return to their homes.

A sign of a "stabilization" of the situation, on Monday "no population" found itself confined or evacuated, the prefect of Var Simon Babre congratulated himself during an evening press briefing.

The fires raging for four days near Athens continued on Monday despite the drop in wind gusts, with a resumption of the fire and new evacuations.

If the firefighters spoke on Monday morning of a slight improvement in the situation, the mayor of the town of Megara – around thirty kilometers west of the capital and one of the main fronts of these fires (mainly forests) – reported a “resumption of fire occurred in the afternoon.”

“While the wind has decreased in the region, in Kandyli there are still gusts and currents which are created from the hot air which rises upwards and we observe a resumption of the fire,” Panagiotis Margetis told AFP.

“The fire is constantly changing direction” and it is getting closer towards the “industrial zone” of Megara, which is very dangerous,” he added, on the public channel Ertnews.

New evacuations have taken place