Wildfires driven by record heat and drought have burned around 500,000 hectares across Europe, Al Jazeera reported on 14 August. [1] In Croatia, the fires reached the coastal tourist town of Omis, where roughly 2,000 people were evacuated, one person was killed and 40 were taken to hospital. [1]
By Saturday afternoon the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, had placed the continent on what she called 'high wildfire alert', warning of increasing pressure on Eastern European nations as thousands of residents were forced from their homes. [2]
The two accounts describe the same season from different angles. Al Jazeera fixes the scale at some half a million hectares and the human cost in one Croatian town; Euronews records Brussels escalating to a continent-wide alert. [1][2] The figures have not been reconciled into a single official tally in the reporting available here, which is itself a measure of how fast the season is moving.
