At least 12 people have died in a wildfire that tore through the southern Spanish province of Almeria, in one of the deadliest such fires in the country in recent memory. Authorities said more than 20 people were still missing and others were injured, NPR reported, as rescue teams searched scorched ground and the toll threatened to rise.
A fire that moved too fast to outrun
The blaze broke out on Thursday near the town of Los Gallardos, in the Andalusia region, and spread with alarming speed through dry, semi-arid country, Al Jazeera reported. According to regional officials, several of those who died were caught trying to escape: some perished on foot after abandoning their vehicles, and others in a car overtaken by the flames. Many of the victims were reported to be foreign nationals from the international communities that have settled along Almeria's coast. Antonio Sanz, who heads Andalusia's emergency services, described how people who fled along a dry riverbed found themselves trapped as the fire closed in.
Extreme heat and a suspected spark
The fire took hold amid a severe heatwave, with temperatures across much of Spain climbing above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), conditions that turn tinder-dry landscapes into fuel and let flames race across them. The cause is under investigation by the Guardia Civil, Spain's national police. Local accounts pointed to a fallen power line as a possible source, though the electricity company Endesa said the line in question was not active and was not its own. For now the origin is unconfirmed, one of the questions the inquiry will have to settle.
A large response, quickly overwhelmed
Spain threw substantial resources at the fire, deploying firefighters and soldiers from the country's military emergency unit alongside dozens of vehicles and aircraft, and evacuating more than a thousand residents and tourists from threatened areas. Even so, the speed of the blaze in such extreme conditions outran the initial effort to contain it, and shelter-in-place orders that some residents did not heed became, in several cases, fatal misjudgments in the confusion.
A summer of fire
The disaster comes in a summer that has already been punishing for Spain and much of southern Europe, with repeated heatwaves and tens of thousands of hectares burned across the country. Scientists have long warned that hotter, drier conditions make fires more frequent, more intense and harder to fight, and this season has borne that out. The Almeria fire, with its heavy loss of life, is the sharpest expression yet of a pattern that has become grimly familiar: extreme heat, parched land, and a blaze that moves faster than the people in its path can. As the search for the missing continues, the final toll, and the full accounting of how so many came to be caught, are still to come.
