Hallelujah, the wind’s dropped! The temperatures have dropped too, although it’s still hot. We now have 500 firemen fighting this fire, but the losses are mounting. Up to 2,000 hectares — including 90% of Fuencaliente — and a dozen houses have burnt. Worse, a man from Fuencaliente has died of a heart attack. One of the three fires is out. The second, in the east side of the island moved…
Photos of the fire
And we now have a fire-fighting unit from Seville come to help. We need them. The “controlled” part of the fire on the east side of the island has apparently revived, and more people have been evacuated from Montes de la Luna. I think the lava flow in the foreground must be the one they’re hoping to use as a natural fire break.
Update on the Fire
The fire started at Tigalate, and the main area of concern is currently between Santa Cecilia and Jeday Well I got one thing wrong in the last post. There was a light breeze here, but up on the ridge where they were fighting the fire, it was blowing a gale up to 65 km/h – exactly the worst sort of weather for fire-fighting. However, I was right that the Princess…
Forest Fire on La Palma
A forest fire is blazing in the south of La Palma, on the boarders of Mazo and Fuencaliente. It started at 11 pm on Friday at Puente Roto. So far, nobody knows for certain what caused it, but the rumour is is that it was fireworks. We’ve had hot weather caused by wind coming from the Sahara (calima) for weeks, and the hillsides are dry as a tinder box. It…
Peace, less-than-perfect peace
Well, I dropped my son off at summer camp yesterday afternoon. Since I only had 800 words of the current translation left, I was looking forward to some “me time” — sort of. I intended to finally sew the curtains for the living room, so we could watch TV or play video games without having the rigmarole of covering up the windows with whatever’s available. (The TV is opposite a…
Going Bananas
When I first came to La Palma in 1990, around 40% of the population depended on the banana trade: growing bananas, packing them, or driving them. But even with the EU subsidy, it’s hard to make a living from bananas. If you’re unlucky with the weather, you can work hard all year and still make a loss. So the economy is diversifying, and a good thing too. But bananas are…