Two things happened four days apart, and together they describe the scale better than either does alone.
On Friday, NASA evacuated all 90 workers from its Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex at Robledo de Chavela, about 37 miles west of Madrid, as wildfires approached. All personnel were confirmed safe, and spacecraft communications shifted to the Goldstone site in California [2].
The Deep Space Network has three stations - Madrid, Goldstone and Canberra - spaced so that something is always facing whatever you are trying to talk to. Each houses a 230-foot antenna weighing about 2,970 tons [2]. Losing one to a fire is not a local inconvenience; it is a gap in the only system that maintains contact with spacecraft including Voyager 1.
On Monday, President Emmanuel Macron convened a crisis meeting of the French cabinet as a fire advanced to within 15 kilometres - about nine miles - of metropolitan Bordeaux, a conurbation of roughly 850,000 people [1].
More than 300,000 people have now been evacuated across France and Spain, with more than 75,000 in Spain, where some blazes slowed their advance and authorities began allowing returns [1].
Jerome Steffe, the mayor of Cestas, called it 'a fire of a size never seen before.' Another heatwave is forecast for later in the week [1].
This piece is not going to assert a cause; a single fire season does not establish one and the attribution work has not been done here. What is measurable is this: the fires have displaced more than a quarter of a million people, reached the edge of a major European city, and taken a third of the world's deep-space communications capacity offline for several days.
