Extinguishing teams yesterday managed to stabilize the Tenerife fire in 95% of its surface after six intense days of fighting an “extremely dangerous” fire due to its rapid spread and turns in different directions, which in at first they had made it “unmanageable”, according to the technical director of Emergencies of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, which participates in Tenerife in the extinguishing tasks, Federico Grillo.
The southern area of ??the fire yesterday was “almost dead and work was being done on the foci that are being reactivated in the municipalities of El Rosario, Tacoronte, El Sauzal and Santa Úrsula, in the northern sector, where in the next few hours no fires are expected complications in extinction. In this area the fire “is in the liquidation phase”.
The complicated part that was intensively worked on yesterday is the south-west sector, with two fronts in the upper part of Güímar. On one of the fronts, work was being done to prevent the fire from spreading to the municipalities of Fasnia and Arico. The other is the one in Mal Abrigo, which is 4 kilometers long.
Mal Abrigo is formed by several ravines that come together in a kind of very steep gorge, where it is very difficult to access to attack it directly. These fronts account for 5% of the fire. “We hope that in a short time it will be stabilized and pending restarts that may arise,” Grillo said.
During the morning of yesterday, the battle that was waged against the fire in Izaña, in the National Park of Teide (La Orotava), was very intense, to free the installations of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands from the flames . The telescopes Themis, Stella and Quijote were left a few meters from the fire after the hard work of the troops.
Until yesterday, the fire had ravaged 14,878 hectares – almost 5,500 in La Orotova – on a perimeter of 88 kilometers in 12 municipalities on the island. The good progress of the work on the ground makes it possible to anticipate that the burned surface could increase in the next few hours, but in a reduced number.
The good forecasts in the control of the fire coincided yesterday with the visit to the area affected by the fire by the acting President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, who undertook to declare the affected area a catastrophic area. As he indicated, once the fire is under control, the Council of Ministers will approve the declaration of an area seriously affected by a civil protection emergency, which will involve aid for the victims and direct support in the reconstruction tasks of the affected areas .
The smoke at low altitudes did cause the air quality to be unfavorable yesterday, especially in the municipalities of Los Realejos, La Orotava and Arafo, where the use of masks was recommended. The Director of Emergencies, Federico Grillo, considered that this fire was “one of the hardest” he has worked on and compared it to “an avalanche”. “Let’s imagine a phenomenon like a flood, in which you have to get out of the middle because it is thrown over you. Well, this fire was like that. He took everything in front of him,” he said.
