Tenerife wildfire continues to burn out of control forcing more people to be evacuated from their homes

The head of the local government team in Tenerife has confessed that the large-scale wildfire on the Spanish island "has evolved as we predicted, and at the moment there we do not have the capacity to extinguish it". Meanwhile, the president of the Canary Islands regional government, Fernando Clavijo, explained that "the situation is not very positive", with dozens of residents already evacuated. Thirteen aircraft, 150 ground troops and 60 members of the police force are already working in the area. Spain's Military Emergency Unit has also been mobilised.

The technical head of forest risk for the area, Pedro Martínez, explained that "the difficult orography of the terrain is making the extinguishing work difficult".

Visible from across almost the entire island of Tenerife, the fire declared between Arafo and Candelaria is advancing uncontrollably with a "virulent and hungry" behaviour producing a dense column of smoke. This is how the forestry engineer, fire analyst, and coordinator of emergencies of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, Federico Grillo, has defined it, explaining on Twitter that "the capacity of extinction is lost when the fire has a hungry behaviour like the one see in the forest fire of Arafo and Candelaria. It exceeds our capacity to tackle it".

The fire declared in Tenerife has already affected an area of about 1,800 hectares (with a perimeter of 22 kilometres) in Arafo, Candelaria and areas bordering Santa Ursula and La Victoria according to the latest damage assessment. At the moment, it is still very virulent with three active fronts out of control. The evolution of the forest fire has forced the evacuation of the upper area of Araya, from Cruz del Camino to Los Brezos, and the upper area of Igueste de Candelaria, on the border of Camino de La Cuestita, where the roads La Morita and Partes Caminos roads meet.

The areas evacuated as a precautionary measure on Wednesday night were Arrate, Chivisaye, Media Montaña and Ajafoña. In addition, during the early hours of Wednesday morning, the emergency services ordered the evacuation of the Las Barreras neighbourhood in El Rosario. Around 150 people have been evacuated so far. There are four people in the shelters set up, two in the Punta Larga sports pavilion (Rambla de los Menceyes) in the municipality of Candelaria and another two in the Andrés Orozco School in Arafo, as most of them have been rehoused in the homes of relatives.

Technicians expect the fire to advance towards the municipality of El Rosario (17,750 inhabitants), which is why a dozen houses in the area of Las Lagunetas and some scattered villages from kilometre 3 of the TF-523 have been evacuated. New settlements in the upper part of the Igueste de Candelaria area have also been evacuated. The roads cut off are the TF 23, between Las Lagunetas and El Portillo, and the TF 523, Carretera Los Loros, according to information from the Cabildo de Tenerife.

From the first hours, the complicated location of the fire and the conditions made it clear that the situation was dangerous. "We were aware that the fire was going to be so powerful that it was beyond our capacity to extinguish it," said Dávila. "It is behaving as we thought it would."

The fire has already crossed the back of the island and is also advancing to several municipalities in the north of Tenerife. Teams are still working on the counter-fire front, while waiting for the arrival of seaplanes and firefighters from several islands. The first amphibious aircraft (Bombardier 415), which rrived from Malaga and is operated by the Spanish Air Force, has already made its first drops of water, and two other similar aircraft are expected to join the fire-fighting effort soon.