CNN
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The charred bodies of 18 people were found as forest fires ravaged Greece on Tuesday and countries across Europe were hit by another heatwave.
The fire brigade said on Tuesday that the dead, who were found near a village in northern Greece, may have been migrants. Another person died in a fire northwest of the capital, Athens, on Monday.
With dozens of forest fires raging in Greece, other parts of the region are grappling with sweltering heat, as Europe’s extreme summer continues. More than 20 countries are under warnings of high temperatures, with temperatures reaching record levels in some areas.
Hundreds of firefighters in Greece are battling 65 forest fires that have broken out in the past few days, the state news agency ANMA reported on Monday citing Yiannis Artopios, an official of the Hellenic Fire Brigade.
Some of the main ongoing wildfires are in the northeastern Greek town of Alexandroupolis, where 13 communities have evacuated since Saturday, according to the fire brigade.
Two hundred patients were evacuated from two hospitals in the town on Tuesday. Nikos Geoktsidis, a nurse at Alexandroupolis Hospital, compared the situation to war, telling Reuters: “I’ve been working for 27 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s really like war conditions.”
Until Monday, the fire was burning More than 8,500 hectares (21,000 acres), according to the European Union’s Copernicus Emergency Management Service.
The European Union deployed two firefighting planes from Cyprus and a team of 50 firefighters from Romania to help Greece control the fires.
“We are in a category 5 emergency, as we will also be on Tuesday due to very high temperatures and gusty winds,” Artopios of the Greek Fire Brigade said on Monday, according to the ANMA news agency.
Greece has had a devastating wildfire season this year – with devastating wildfires Worst recorded fires in July since at least 2003.
Last month, deadly forest fires ravaged parts of the Greek island of Rhodes, forcing thousands of tourists to flee their hotels in what Greek officials described as the largest evacuation effort in the country’s history.
Out-of-control wildfires are also still burning in Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands, with more than 12,000 people forced to flee their homes.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Monday during a visit to the Spanish island that the Spanish government will declare the areas affected by the forest fires in Tenerife a “disaster area” once the fire is under control.
With parts of Greece and Spain burning, temperatures have reached record levels in other parts of Europe.
MeteoAlarm, a network of Europe’s national weather services, said there were 21 countries across the continent under heat warnings, of which six were under red heat warnings – the highest level.
France is among the worst affected countries.
The country’s national meteorological agency, Meteo France, warned on Sunday that this week’s heat wave would be “the hottest in summer 2023,” adding that it was rare for a heat wave of this “severity” to occur late in the summer.
“Red level” heat wave alerts were declared in four French departments on Monday: Ardèche, Drome, Haute-Loire and Rhone.
All of these regions experience very high temperatures, with some exceeding 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).
Speaking to CNN affiliate BFMTV, French Health Minister Aurelian Rousseau said Monday that “France could reach temperatures that have not been measured before.”
Some records have already been broken, according to data from Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist and weather historian.
He said all-time records were broken in three municipalities, including Puy Saint-Martin, a town in Drome, where temperatures reached 42.5 degrees Celsius (108.5 Fahrenheit) on Monday.
Rousseau warned the French people to be “extremely vigilant” in the coming days, stressing that protecting the elderly, young children, isolated and disabled people remained “at the core” of the government’s concerns.
And temperatures are also high in Italy, which has suffered several heatwaves this year. Savona, in the northwest, saw an all-time record high of 39.1 degrees Celsius (102.4 Fahrenheit) on Monday.
Switzerland is also experiencing a rise in temperatures.
The Swiss weather service MeteoSchweiz said a new record had been broken for the height of the “freezing level” – the point above Earth where temperatures drop to 0 degrees Celsius (32 Fahrenheit).
The meteorological balloon had to climb to a record height of 5,298 meters (17,381 feet) above sea level before reaching the zero Celsius limit, according to MeteoSchweiz. Posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday. This is the highest freezing level since records began in 1954.
There are serious concerns What this means for the health of the country’s glaciers. And last year, Swiss glaciers recorded their worst melting rate since records began, losing 6% of their remaining volume.
The heatwave in Europe is expected to continue until at least Wednesday, before the cooling pattern brings some respite.
Scientists are clear that the kind of extreme weather experienced in Europe and other parts of the northern hemisphere this summer will become more common and more dangerous as humans continue to burn the fossil fuels that warm the planet.
July was the hottest month on record on Earth, and scientists found that the heat wave that swept across the Mediterranean, as well as parts of the United States, would have been practically impossible without the human-caused climate crisis.
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