Spain hit by devastating wildfire

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0:40Hello, welcome to the programme. This is News Hour from the BBC World Service. I'm Paul Henley, coming to you live from London. Wildfire season in southern Europe is here already, and feeling the most deadly force of seasonal blazers amid the latest record-breaking heatwave is Almeria in the south of Spain. At least 12 people there are known to have died. Many more are still missing. Local officials believe four victims found in a car were British tourists. Hundreds of emergency responders are working to contain the flames. Now, the blaze changes direction with the wind, and online footage shows fire engines arriving to confront advancing flames while helicopters dump water from above.

1:27This fire spread rapidly, particularly in a wooded area around the town of Los Gallardos in the province of Almería. Its mayor, Francisco Reyes, Ted said the authorities were working hard to get people in areas still at risk to safety. The fire started and has spread very quickly. We have had to evacuate residents from Almucaiza and residents from Beda, and now we are heading towards the campsite because the wind is blowing from the west and it's going to reach the campsite where we also have 400 to 500 people. We are very concerned because houses are burning. These residents have been moved out of the area as an emergency, the area affected by the fire in Los Gallados.

2:17That was really awful, really awful. Gas cylinders exploding, everything. houses on fire, windows shattering. Because there are witnesses. They were caught in a large villa in the middle of a pine forest and they got away by the skin of their teeth.

2:37It gave me a right fright. I didn't even have time to react. It happened so fast. The fire was like a Formula One car.

2:48I see that it is very bad, awful, A disaster not just for the woodland, but for the people who've already died and everything that has happened. The house right up there above has burned completely. It rips your soul out. This is what you're left with. I had 600 orange trees. Well, our Europe correspondent Nick Beak reports now from the scene of the wildfire. For the last couple of hours, we've been driving towards the site of this wildfire, but we've just stopped at the side of the road here because of what we saw out the window. flames up there on the hillside this part of spain is still burning despite the fact that just a few seconds ago we saw the firefighters go overhead and they were dumping large amounts of water on those flames it seems to the naked eye to have made an impact very very briefly but the problem is here with the wind and the surroundings being so dry here the fire spreads extremely quickly and And that is what happened overnight with this devastating fire.

3:52We know at least 12 people killed, dozens missing. And so this place is really, really trying to work out what happened. But they're concerned about what may come in the coming days and weeks. But for now, a lot of people, they're in grief. They're in shock, really, after what's happened. The BBC's Nick Beak. Well, British family Lucinda Courtois, her partner Riaz Chaitan and their teenage children have a holiday home close to where these fires started. Last night they fled the area, as Lucinda first told NewsHour's Sean Lay. We were at our holiday home at the villa and we had a call from my father just before half seven just letting us know that there were rumours of a fire and possible precautionary evacuation and we were just getting in the pool.

4:42Riaz and his son, Zach, had just arrived a few hours before. And within 10 minutes of that call, there were billows of black clouds coming over the ridge of the hills. And over the ridge to the side, we could suddenly see massive clouds, black clouds. And we were still in the pool and sort of suddenly said, we'd better maybe move. And then we heard from some neighbours that evacuation was happening and it was imminent. The kids went up to the top of the house and said they could see flames along the ridge, which we couldn't see from the pool. So we packed up and pretty much ran. And I would say within 30 minutes of the initial call from my dad, we were driving into the wall of fire.

5:21Riaz, it must have been quite terrifying. It was. And the road that we were taking is actually the main road down. So when you start driving down that road and there's fire both sides, that's what hits you that this could go really wrong. And luckily there were two coaches coming down as well, evacuating people who had to stop and turn around as well. So at some point you realised you couldn't get through that way. Yeah, so Lucinda was driving, she came onto the road, we went round the corner and all of a sudden there was just fire and you thought, stop straight away. We turned the car around and had to go back on ourselves and then you start thinking, is the fire, are we driving into the fire in a different way now?

5:56Which gets quite scary. How were the children reacting to this? I mean, what sort of age are the children you have between the two of you? 116, 117. I think there was definitely a silence in the car because I think everyone realised how serious the situation was. What have been the previous experiences? I mean, there have been wildfires in southern Spain before, of course, but is there a kind of a change in mood over this issue? Are people more concerned now than perhaps in previous years? Yeah, there was a fire, I can't remember exactly, maybe 15 years ago that was quite serious then, but I don't believe any deaths.

6:34everybody's very aware on the mountain about how dry it is and that no one can use power tools and everybody has to be careful and there's no outside fires but there's been significant loss of life we've lost family friends close family friends so there's a lot of people at the hotel we're at and yeah people are shattered they've lost you know well they don't know if they've lost their homes because none of us have allowed back so we don't know what's gone and what's not the other question I suppose just on that, do you have people you know who are still unaccounted for? We did, but we've just heard that they've been found dead.

7:08That must have been a terrible shock, what you'd feared, I guess, but even so hearing it so definitively. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know what to say. It's horrific. Yeah. The other thing I suppose, Riaz, is what kind of official communication there has been over the last 24 hours. Have you heard anything or people pretty much relying on word of mouth between each other, WhatsApp groups and just kind of trying to monitor local radio and television? There is a local Wildfire Watch app, which has been really good. So people post on there. There's a mix of official communications on there and people posting saying, I've got a house you can come and stay in or there's a farm or something to go to.

7:51the official communications have been i'd say fairly minimal but given what they're doing and how quick it's changing i don't think any of us got an issue with that because they've got there are planes constantly flying above us with water in them the helicopters with water going through there's about nearly 200 firemen trying to fix this as well so we're getting that information that they're doing it but no information about how bad it is in radar or when we can get back to the house if we can get back to the house even lucinda rears you're in a hotel now i guess there are a lot of people in the same situation as you loads there's a lot here in the hotel with us and people just scattered wherever they could they could get to but you know a lot of the people here they don't know if they've got their homes we were lucky we were on holiday but for other people it's there it's their whole whole life lucinda curto is in almeria at the joint research center of the european commission there's a team that analyzes data to map and predict the spread of wildfires across Europe.

8:49Fernando Sedano is team leader. He's from Spain. He's a forester by training. I asked him what he'd noticed first about the fire in Almeria. For many years, we've been thinking about forest fires. This fire in Almeria is not a forest fire. Less than 2 % of the burn area is forest. We are talking about agricultural landscapes, a mixed landscape of natural vegetation, olive trees or other trees. This is an area where we have populated centres scattered across the landscape. And this makes it very tough to plant and fight because you have a lot of population close to the vegetation, to the fuel. Other than that, this fire has been very, very fast because there were strong winds in the area.

9:34And can you confirm that the number of fires breaking out in recent years has increased? What other information? Are they going further north? Are they happening earlier in the season? The total number of fires has not necessarily increased, but the number of large, very large fires seems to be increasing in the last years. It is also true that fires and large fires are taking place at latitudes where they didn't take place before. While back in the days we thought about wildfires as a problem in southern Europe, now we know that fires are happening at higher latitudes. France, the UK had some big fires last year.

10:172018 was particularly bad in Sweden, for instance. And they tend to be associated with the end of long, dry summers. We're just at the beginning of this summer. Is that different? This year has been different in a sense that we had our first heat wave very early in May. A lot of parts of Europe already experienced very high temperatures. I'm thinking about Portugal, Spain, France, but also Germany. We had a second heat wave in June and without no transition, we moved into July with very high temperatures. So this year's and usually in that sense, it's true, as you mentioned, that often what we see is that big fires happen later in the season as a consequence of heat waves that happen later in the season and the cumulative effect of the heat waves that happened before.

11:08This year, we are a bit unknown. And what practical difference can your research and your forecasts make? The fact that we have been collecting information for such a long time in a consistent way is what is allowing us to identify these patterns and these trends at European scale. But if we look more into the day-to-day, we are basically monitoring fires with satellite images. And we are able to identify where the fires are and how these fires are behaving. We update the information up to eight times every day. So that information, knowing where the fires happen and how they are evolving, is of great use for fire managers and civil protection agencies across Europe.

11:53Great use to the extent that it can help stop fire spreading? Great use to the extent that it can help making decisions related to fire extinction or evacuation of population, these kind of things. based on how fires are evolving, knowing where the critical infrastructures are, where the populated centres are, protected areas are, knowing how the weather is going to be in the coming days allows us to make decisions about this particular town may need to be evacuated or we may need to attack in this valley or we may need to retreat to this area because it's safer, this kind of operational decisions.

12:32When you see images of this fire taking your scientist's hat off for a moment. How do you react to see your home country in flames like that? Well, it's sad to say, but it's not the first time. So last year was particularly bad for Spain. So North West Spain, Spain in general, had more than 350 ,000 hectares of burn area. So over the years, this is happening and happening. So I would say that this is the reality that we need to live, or learn to live with. Fernando Sedano, who leads the wildfire team at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. You're listening to the BBC World Service.

13:10We're live from London. This is NewsHour.

13:35Coming up, watching the World Cup amongst the rubble of Gaza. Seeing these scenes was very encouraging. This is a way for the people of Gaza to leave behind their tragedies, their displacement. And it was a glimmer of hope. It was effectively an expression of happiness, especially seeing how popular World Cup games are. The headlines Nigeria's government says more than 20 schoolchildren and their teachers have been rescued from kidnappers by the security forces. Satellite images show the rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon continued to slow in the first half of this year, reaching its lowest level in a decade.

14:16And police in Britain have arrested a man on suspicion of murdering the prominent former politician, Anne Whittacombe.

14:35I'm Paul Henley with NewsHour, live from the BBC. Paleontologists in Thailand say they've discovered a new species of dinosaur from fossils found in a province in the north-east of the country. The plant-eating dinosaur, named Aragosaurus callocinensis, is thought to have lived about 150 million years ago. It had an unusually long neck. It was 20 metres in length in the body. We can speak to Jack Lovegrove, or we heard earlier from him, a PhD researcher who studies dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum here in London. I asked him what else we knew about this new species. Did it look, because of its long neck, like a brontosaurus?

15:17This new dinosaur, Euragosaurus, belongs to a group of dinosaurs known as the sauropods, which are the long-necked iconic dinosaurs like Diplodocus brontosaurus that you mentioned. Specifically, it belongs to a group known as the Mementosaurids, which actually had the longest necks of any sauropods. So it's one of the longest necks of the long-necked dinosaurs. You could tell a lot about it from a single vertebrae, I hear. Yes, that's what I was just about to go on to. So what's cool about this dinosaur is that despite only finding one bone, one vertebrae from the back, scientists have been able to figure out not just what group of dinosaurs it belongs to, but that it is a new species and give it a new name.

15:59And it's significant as it's the first Mementosaurid to be named from Thailand, and it's only the second one to be named from outside China. So it shows that this group that we previously thought might have been restricted to China, East Asia, is actually more widely distributed. I know you weren't part of the team that discovered these remains or this fossil, but you have read the paper in detail. Tell us about the operation, the paleontologist operation to find it. Yes, so my understanding from reading about this is that actually initially the fossil site was discovered by a local farmer. So this is something that happens a lot in paleontology because there's not a huge amount of paleontologists and we can't be everywhere.

16:40that often it's members of the public find stuff, report it, and then people are able to come along and make, Hayley and Todd just able to come along and make these important discoveries. And what's cool about the locality that this dinosaur comes from is that it wasn't just one, as well as this one bone from this new dinosaur, there was a whole array of other things, so pterosaurs, crocodiles, fish, all mixed together in this one locality. All able to be dated fairly precisely? How? so we on so the dating is still a little bit up in the air based on comparisons with other faunas as i mentioned this is a group that we know from china from the end of the jurassic these momentous we think that this was probably latest jurassic but we don't i don't think they yet have radiometric dating on this formation but we're pretty sure it's late triassic maybe earliest cretaceous tell us a little bit more about the air sacs in the bone yes so with sauropods one of the things that happens with their vertebrae that makes them so easy to identify is they get air sacs coming off of the lungs, which is something we also see in birds, invade the vertebrae.

17:49And as they invade the vertebrae, they create a really distinctive pattern of bony laminations and also holes and kind of hollows in the side of the vertebrae. And so one of the things that's used to identify this new dinosaur as a new type of dinosaur is when you look at the vertebrae from the front, these laminations form a Y shape, whereas in its close relative to the Mentiosaurus, they form more of an X shape on the front. Jack Lovegrove, PhD researcher who studies dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum here in London.

18:23Another museum exhibit now, one of the most famous historical artefacts in the world, the Bayeux Tapestry, which documents the French invasion of England in 1066, has arrived in London for an exhibition at the British Museum. The masterpiece was placed in a special container to avoid vibrations and to maintain a steady temperature before it left France. For the first time in more than 900 years, it's already proving a big draw at the museum with massive advanced demand for tickets. Among the VIPs in attendance to witness the transfer of this precious cargo was Hélène Traillat-Duchene, who is France's ambassador to the UK.

19:01You know, for France, it's an extraordinary gesture, this loan of the Bayeux tapestry. It's the first time that the Bayeux tapestry is leaving the French soul and it goes to the UK. And it means something for the bilateral relation, for the fact that former enemy, because it was about battle, are now able to have this kind of trust at the moment that we are ready to lend you the Bayou tapestry. The extent to which the British public seem to take the tapestry to their hearts has surprised historian Elisabeth van Houtz. She is an Emeritus Professor of Medieval European History at the University of Cambridge.

19:50There is a profound contradiction. On the one hand, I think the British people love the object of the biotapestry, the artifact, the fact that it's an embroidery that is 900 years old, that it was made in England, that it hasn't been in England for about 900 years. Yet the story is actually is a story of William the Conqueror's conquest of England. It wasn't that he was invited to come. No, he decided that the crown of England should be his because he was a relative of King Edward, the king who had died, and by force take over this very wealthy country. And that is what he did against all the odds.

20:39Who were the Normans exactly? So the Normans were the people who lived in the province of Normandy. They were French-speaking. They themselves were immigrants from Scandinavia, but they had completely assimilated with the French population. How did England change post-1066? The people who experienced a revolutionary change were the people who were the landholders, who thought that they owned the land and the houses on them, only to find that after William the Conqueror arrived, he gave the land and the houses to his Normans and other French people who had come over with him. So the English people became tenants of the land that they thought they owned, and that was a huge, huge shock.

21:36They didn't start speaking French, but the language changed too, didn't it? Absolutely. So the incoming elites, they spoke French and they introduced Latin for documentary sources. French also became the language of the courts. A great deal of French vocabulary entered the English language. The structure of the English language remained a Germanic language, but the vocabulary increased by about a third. What do you think in the post-Brexit age now of the British public's response to having a Bayeux tapestry in this country? What do you think of it? Well, I'm surprised, I'm sort of pleasantly surprised that there is this interest in an artifact that, you know, was clearly embroidered in England by English men and women, but then has been preserved in France for 900 years.

22:35And that there is such huge enthusiasm, given the number of tickets for the exhibition that has been sold, for an embroidery that tells this rather horrific story. And in terms of Brexit, I think that Macron can certainly be very pleased with the coup that he has achieved by allowing the embroidery coming to Britain and indeed kindling so much enthusiasm for it in Britain. And that can only increase the cultural and diplomatic connections between the two countries. That was medieval historian Elisabeth van Houtz of Cambridge University. This is NewsHour.

23:45from the BBC. Iran has buried its former supreme leader after a six-day funeral procession, while still exchanging strikes with the US. The ceasefire is fragile at best. At worst, it's over. Could anything bring peace? Listen to the global story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

24:09Welcome back to NewsHour. Medical researchers here in Britain have developed a non-invasive procedure to treat a serious condition that can affect identical twins during pregnancy. The syndrome can happen when twins share a placenta, potentially putting both of them in danger. In a moment, we'll hear from the scientist who led the study. First, Bryony Garrett is a mother of twins whose lives were saved using this pioneering technique. Being diagnosed, we were only at 12 weeks and they were already at stage three, so it was very dire. The conversations were really directed towards elective abortion and all these things that just, to me, sounded horrific.

24:46And the laser treatment was also unavailable to me due to many reasons, and I was very blessed that the consultant I saw in Bristol was aware of Dr Lees and the trial and put me forward. You know, the risks were low. The worst risk was that nothing was going to work, and I was already in that place. So for me, there was nothing to lose. Professor Christophe Lees is head of foetal medicine at Imperial College Healthcare Trust in London. What is the new syndrome this treatment has been developed for? Twin-twin transfusion syndrome is a condition that is limited to identical twins that share a placenta.

25:21So about a third of all twins are identical and about 10 % of those will develop this condition, which arises because they share a placenta and there are blood vessels that connect the two portions of the placenta from one twin to another. And that can become a problem. If the blood vessels direct blood from one twin to another, then one twin can gradually lose its circulating blood volume and it ends up transfusing, hence the twin-twin transfusion syndrome. It ends up transfusing or passing into the circulation of the other twin. And then what you can get is a complete imbalance of circulation and blood volume.

26:00So you get one baby that is constantly pumping blood around its own body and also some of this blood is escaping into the other twin and the other twin ends up suffused with blood with too much blood and fluid and then that can cause real difficulties for one or both of the twins can lead to miscarriage or injury and death so an ultrasound is an incredibly safe modality very very high power and i'm talking about thousands of times the power of standard ultrasound, directed very, very specifically to a tiny point. And we've used it from outside the mother's abdomen. So we don't need to do anything invasive at all.

26:39And that allows you to focus extremely carefully and precisely on one little area, one or two millimeters in diameter. So a blood vessel. And we can actually stop the blood flow in that blood vessel by using high-intensity focused ultrasound. The challenge is to be able to do this safely and do it effectively. So could we see the vessels in the placenta? Well, 10, 15 years ago, you couldn't. But advances in ultrasound imaging have allowed us, with very, very specific Doppler technology, to visualize tiny vessels with very low velocity flow in the placenta. And, of course, the next stage is being able to do this safely because HIFU in the wrong hands can cause complications.