MILAN (AP) – Firefighters worked on Thursday to extinguish the remnants of two wildfires on a Sicilian island that have forced fashion designer Giorgio Armani and dozens of others to flee their vacation villas overnight.
A photo from Pantelleria Island showed flames appearing to be entering Armani’s mansion, but the Italian designer’s press office said they stopped just short of the property. Armani and guests were evacuated onto a boat in the port.
The region’s disaster management agency chief Salvatore Cocina said arson had been suspected in two wildfires that forced about 30 people to take refuge on boats or in safer parts of the island. Firefighters deployed Canadair aircraft to put out the blazes, along with ground teams to protect homes. Authorities said no structures appeared to have been lost.
The island’s mayor, Vincenzo Campo, told Italian news agency ANSA that two planes were working to put out the last of the flames on difficult terrain and that the wind had eased.
“After the big scare from last evening and night at work, Pantelleria is getting back to normal,” said Campo. “It seems the worst is over.”
Local officials asked for information that would help determine the cause of the fire, which broke out in two locations 400 meters (a quarter mile) apart.
Pantelleria, located between Sicily and Tunisia, is a popular beach and trekking destination with ancient archaeological sites and natural geographic formations.
Scientists say global warming will make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. Much of western Europe has seen little rain this summer, and droughts combined with hot weather have fueled destructive wildfires.
So far this summer, wildfires in Spain have blackened more than 700,000 hectares, the largest area since the European Union began collecting satellite data in 2006.
The EU’s Earth observation program said even hotter weather was forecast for Spain as two “catastrophic” wildfires raged in the eastern part of the country. The fires in the Mediterranean provinces of Alicante and Castellón have each charred more than 13,000 hectares, the EU authority said.
Meanwhile, Portuguese authorities reported that a forest fire that burned for nearly two weeks in the pine forests of Serra da Estrela National Park has been brought under control. But officials warned of weather forecasts suggesting a dangerous new heatwave was about to arrive.
High temperatures, high winds, and a severe drought helped sustain the fire in the park, where deep gorges and steep slopes make firefighting difficult.
More than 1,100 firefighters stayed in the Serra da Estrela, keeping an eye out for hot spots and embers that could be blown into pristine forests, said the Civil Protection Agency, a government agency.
The fire charred more than 26,000 hectares (64,000 acres) of woodland — about a quarter of the park’s area, according to the European Union.
On Wednesday, the fire’s perimeter measured 100 miles, emergency officials said, and jumped 400-foot-wide firebreaks that had been cleared since the region’s last major fire in 2017.
Fire officials said it was an indication the country was battling a “new generation” of wildfires that were becoming harder to stop amid the impact of climate change.
Temperatures in Portugal should start to rise, reaching 39 degrees Celsius (102.2 F) inland on Saturday as the country suffers its third heatwave of the summer.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of climate and environmental issues at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment