Heatwave turns southeastern Europe into tinderbox as fires rage

ITALY: Southeastern Europe was a tinderbox Wednesday in the grip of an unrelenting heatwave that has claimed hundreds of lives as wildfires swept Italy and bit into a national park in Slovakia.

Italy was sweltering under temperatures close to 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in places Wednesday and suffering devastating wildfires in central and southern regions.

"We've had 85 calls so far already for airborne intervention against fires," a public safety official told AFP in the afternoon as fires raged in the Abruzzo, Latium, Calabria, Sicily and Sardinia regions.

More than 5,000 hectares (12,500 acres) of farmland have been destroyed, worth some one billion euros (1.4 billion dollars), according to the Italian Farmers Confederation.

In southeastern Apulia on Tuesday, two people were burned alive in their car near the Adriatic coastal town of Peschici, while on Monday a pilot died when his Canadair plane crashed while he was fighting a fire in mountainous Abruzzo.

"The alert remains high across the country," fire services spokesman Luca Cari told AFP earlier. "We have doubled the personnel rotations to ensure a stronger presence ... and we have transferred personnel from the north of the country to the south to help us."

In Romania authorities said the heatwave-related death toll rose to 33 with three more people succumbing on Tuesday.

In the capital Bucharest where temperatures reached 37 degrees Celsius (99 Fahrenheit) more than 170 people fainted in the street. Ambulance services received a record of more than 1,200 calls over the past 24 hours, according to the Mediafax news agency.

In Slovakia a lightning strike sparked a huge forest fire on Sunday that was still raging across about 10 hectares of the Slovensky Raj (Slovakian Paradise) national park in the east of the country.

Meanwhile the mercury reached 46 degrees Celsius (115 F) in parts of Greece, where a dozen forest fires were burning and up to five people have died from heat-related causes since Monday.

Another fire on the Ionian island of Kefalonia threatened some nearby towns, firefighters said.

The heatwave caused a spike in smog pollution in Athens, with ozone levels above emergency limits in several districts, prompting the government to urge motorists to avoid the city centre. Ozone levels were not expected to improve on Thursday.

The fire department said 99 blazes had broken out around Greece since Tuesday, added to hundreds of fires that have burned thousands of hectares of forest and agricultural land since a first heat wave last month.

Meanwhile there were increasing fears for the health of the people affected by Britain's worst floods in living memory Thursday, as thousands were left without fresh water.

The warnings came amid expectations of further water surges in southern England, with six severe flood warnings still in place, as tributaries feeding the River Thames engulfed several areas in the university city of Oxford overnight.

Of mounting concern, however, was the impact of contaminated flood waters on the health of affected towns, with one health expert recommending children not wade into the water.

"There are still very real health risks and hygiene risks - it's vital people don't become complacent," Professor Ian Cluckie, chairman of the government-backed Flood Risk Management Research Consortium, was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail. "The problem is the water ... will become contaminated with raw sewage which means that there will still be E coli in there," Cluckie said, adding that it could lead to cholera or dysentery.

Utility Severn Trent has set up 900 bowsers - mobile water tankers - in Tewkesbury and the nearby cities of Cheltenham and Gloucester, while the army has been drafted in to provide four million litres of bottled drinking water amid warnings that water supplies to parts of Gloucestershire could be cut off for at least two weeks.

Martin Horwood, MP for the Cheltenham area of Gloucestershire, voiced the complaints of several residents of the area, however, when he said he "checked a dozen (bowsers) late last night, and found the majority empty."

Beer tankers have also been used to provide water to places hardest hit, with the British Beer and Pub Association joking that it has been a reversal of its usual job of turning water into beer.

Rome, London, Thursday, AFP