The ground and air troops continue to work piecemeal on the Tenerife fire. The high temperatures that are expected tomorrow are a problem, but the wind, its direction, during the night is even more so.
The Minister of Security of the Government of the Canary Islands, Julio Pérez, has announced early in the afternoon of today Saturday that, in application of the Infoca Plan, the evacuation in a series of neighborhoods in Los Realejos and La Orotava.
Pérez has insisted that “these are evacuations that are based on the need to ensure that neither the fire nor the extinction work cause damage and inconvenience to the neighbors” and not an evacuation because there is an “imminent danger.”
Protecting people, as Pedro Martín, president of the Council of Tenerife, is, right now, an absolute priority: “All efforts are focused on protecting homes. That’s where most of the troops are.”
Martín, in relation to the Tenerife fire, wanted to emphasize that it has a perimeter of “20 kilometers” which makes it difficult to control it: “It has entered the Teide National Park, but for the moment it has not been the entrance more worrying, because it is not an area with a high density of Canarian pine. There are spaces like La Fortaleza where there is not much vegetation. The perimeter is more than 20 kilometers.
For this reason, “11 helicopters” are currently working, being able to join the extinction work “another seaplane” arrived from the Peninsula: “We are rushing the last hours of the day with a very great effort. Tomorrow temperatures rise, that’s bad, but the worst is the wind, the changes it may have. The fire has jumped several firewalls.”
