The fire on the island of Tenerife, which has already spread over the surface of nine municipalities and has devastated nearly 4,000 hectares, began to behave “normally” this Friday after unusual virulence in the first 48 hours due to the dryness of the terrain and “extreme” terrain conditions after the heat wave that hit the Canary Islands last week.
“It is a fire of enormous severity”, said this Friday the general director of Natural Spaces and Biodiversity of the Government of the Canary Islands, Miguel Ángel Morcuende. Until now, as he points out, it was the fire that set the conditions, making it difficult to plan the extinction work. Since Thursday night, the fire has been adjusting to the weather conditions, allowing the teams to set strategies and anticipate the advance of the fire. This change has allowed the actions undertaken to work successfully in the last 24 hours and has led the authorities to be “moderately optimistic” about its evolution in the next few hours. Although, as the authorities made clear this Friday, the fire is still out of control and still far from the ability to extinguish. “There are hard days ahead, especially taking into account the meteorological change that is expected for the next few days with rising temperatures,” said the technical head of Forest Risk of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Pedro Martínez, on Friday.
The aerial means and the ground teams worked this Friday on five sectors in a fire that has a perimeter of more than 42 kilometers, as detailed by Martínez. Of these five areas, two are of particular concern and are being worked on with the greatest intensity. It is about the north flank, in La Esperanza (municipality of El Rosario), where this Friday it was about establishing defensive lines to prevent the fire from advancing and damaging infrastructures and homes in an area of ??great dispersion of buildings; the other is the La Orotava front, in the south, where the actions are complicated by the steepness of the terrain. These are vertical walls where it is difficult to act. “Right now there is little controlled perimeter but those two points are the most worrying because it is very close to the populations,” says Martínez.
The effectiveness of the actions in La Esperanza allowed on Friday to halve the number of people confined, which has gone from 3,820 people to 1,671. The evacuees remain at 4,509, without new evictions since this Friday.
The Ministry of Defense sent to the Canary Islands this Friday a plane loaded with ten containers of retardant material and two with foam concentrate, which is expected to be key to fighting the fire, especially in the areas with the worst accessibility. As indicated by Martínez, the retardant allows a chemical insulator to be impregnated on the vegetation and prevents the spread of fire by creating preventive lines while the foam concentrate allows air discharges to be more effective.
This Friday the east wind entered the island, which caused flares in some areas, as the president of the Government of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, had warned. “Citizens should not be alarmed if they see this because they are not new sources but the air provides oxygen to the flames.”
