Wildfires along France’s popular Riviera coastline forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 people last night — including 3,000 who were staying at campsites along the coastline.
The fresh wildfires were not the first in recent days, as numerous others have started due to “favorable” conditions. Of course, not that far away, in Portugal, this summer’s wildfires have been particularly extreme and have actually killed quite a number of people.
While tying specific events such as this to the general climate warming (and weirding) trend that the world is now undergoing isn’t something that can be done definitively, it still seems worth drawing a link here.
The Mediterranean region as a whole is now drying out at a fairly fast rate and is expected to continue doing so until it becomes quite a different place to what it is now. Accompanying this, wildfires are expected to become much more common, and also more extreme. In other words, the events discussed above (and even the fires in Portugal) are just a very mild taste of what’s to come.
Reuters provides some more information: “Not far west of the yacht-filled marinas of Saint-Tropez resort, 10,000 people were evacuated — 3,000 of them from campsites — as a fast-encroaching fire ripped through the hills of La Lodes les Manures, the Lavabo and Bromes.
“Hundreds of firefighters fought the blaze with planes and helicopters dropping tonnes of water on the tinder box hills where fires regularly break out in summer time, often as a result of a carelessly discarded cigarette butt.
“Thousands of hectares of land have been devastated by flames since the start of the week, although Tuesday night’s evacuation was far larger than other more minor ones where dozens of people and horses were moved to safety from fast-encroaching infernos. High winds risked whipping up more fires, said the prefect’s office of the Vary region, where most of the blazes are located.”
There will no doubt be some objecting to me drawing a direct link here, but the truth is that as the decades go by, some parts of the Mediterranean region are going to regularly go up in flames — and the expensive efforts to contain these fires are going to become less and less economically viable.
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