Large forest fires burned out of control in southwestern France and central Spain today, driving 87,000 people from their homes. “Some people fled by boat after flames swept through the tourist destination of Cap Ferret on France’s Atlantic coast, while dozens of firefighters were injured,” reports India Times. “The fires remained uncontained as strong winds and extreme heat complicated efforts to control them. France and Spain sought help from fellow European Union members, while Spain declared a national emergency over wildfires for the first time. In Italy, wildfires also continued to hit parts of Sicily.”
In France, a fire that has raged since Wednesday near Cap Ferret burned through 50 square miles. The peninsula, less than 40 miles from the big city of Bordeaux, “is known for its beaches, landscapes, oyster-farming villages and resorts. More than 20,000 people had already been evacuated from towns and holiday resorts on Thursday, and further evacuations followed on Friday. Around 67,000 people left the affected areas in France, including 44,000 in Gironde and 23,000 in Landes. The latest evacuations were carried out by road, with boat shuttles arranged for those who could not travel on their own.”
Bigger, better drones are being built to fight large wildfires. Artificial intelligence recently spotted a wildfire in a canyon in California’s Orange County, and alerted firefighters, who were able to put out the fire before it could spread widely.
“An interesting and counterintuitive paper finds that wildfires in the western United States might actually improve air quality in the east thanks to the heat they generate, which blocks smoke from drifting and creates more rainfall that washes pollution out of the air,” notes The Doomslayer. In the southeast, unlike California, states do a sufficient amount of controlled burns to get rid of flammable material, and keep wildfires from raging out of control, as NPR explained in 2021.
Drones are also providing vaccines to immunize hundreds of thousands of children in the African nations of Ghana and Kenya, protecting them against potentially lethal diseases.
On some American farms, there are drones with artificial intelligence that spray fungicides to kill pests. As Bloomberg News notes, “These aerial acrobats use less than a tenth of the energy of ground tractors — and they don’t squash the crops, rut the earth or even touch the soil.”
