"Historic record" of fires in France: 100,000 hectares burned while evacuations continue

BarcelonaFrance continues to be immersed in a fight to extinguish various active fires across the country. 98,000 hectares have been scorched since the beginning of the year, figures that the Minister of the Interior, Laurent Nuñez, has described as a "historic record".

The most serious fire is in the Gironde region, with its epicenter in the Arcaishon basin, a bay southwest of Bordeaux, which has already burned 32,700 hectares. This is one of the main tourist areas on the Atlantic coast: it hosts several luxury villas and is currently full of tourists who have settled there for their summer holidays. There, the flames have forced the evacuation of 57,000 people overnight, adding to the 110,000 evacuated in recent days. Thus, the number of evacuated people in the southwest is now practically 200,000.

The flames are advancing towards the metropolitan area of Bordeaux and are already "thirty kilometers" from the regional capital, but the Minister of the Interior has ruled out that, for now, the city needs to be evacuated. In fact, on Friday afternoon, the fire forced the closure of the airport. Precisely in Bordeaux, there are currently about 6,000 people housed at the Exhibition Center who were evacuated on Friday from the Gulf of Arcaishon, via the only road to the gulf and also by sea.

The French Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has convened a government meeting this afternoon to address the crisis. A decision he announced after asking the army to deploy a military transport plane to try to quell the flames in Gironde.

The fire reportedly started on Wednesday at noon, according to a witness speaking to the AFP agency, who claims to have seen a column of smoke in a pine forest in the municipality of Saumos. Police confirm that the cause of the fire was an "accident" and are working with the hypothesis of a spark that may have occurred during the cleaning of an electrical line carried out by a contractor for the company Enedis.

Firefighters, overwhelmed

In parallel, there are other considerable forest fires that continue out of control and are enormously straining French firefighters. "Our security forces are immersed in an authentic battle against forest fires," assured the head of the Interior on Thursday evening. Therefore, France requested the support of aerial means from the European Union to combat the active fires.

Just forty kilometers from Arcaishon, in the municipality of Biscarròssa – which already belongs to the department of Landes – there is another large fire that has burned 3,500 hectares, according to firefighters, who expect to control the fire this Saturday despite "turbulent winds." This fire forced the evacuation of more than 23,000 people, mainly from campsites and houses, as well as a children's summer camp and a retirement home.

Other hot spots

Another of the critical points is in the department of Var, on the French east coast, where multiple outbreaks were registered this Thursday. More than 800 firefighters continue to be deployed there to contain the fire. In this case, the fire would have started on Tuesday at noon in a field and would have spread to burn 3,250 hectares. The 400 people who had been evacuated were able to return to their homes on Friday morning.

The flames have also engulfed 510 hectares in the department of Hautes-Alpes, near the border with Italy. There the fire started due to a lightning strike and now affects "an area of difficult access" at an altitude of 1,800 meters, according to the minister.

To these fires are still added several: that of Corsica – which this Saturday advanced 10 hectares, after having burned nearly 800 – that of Pairin e Aut Montel, in the Tarn region – which is already controlled, but which has burned 600 hectares – and another that started on Friday in Toès i Entrevalls, in the Conflent region of Northern Catalonia, which has burned 40 hectares and is still advancing.

France has been affected by three major heatwaves that southern Europe has suffered this early summer. According to the French government, more than 12,500 forest fires have been registered since the beginning of the year and the burned area already exceeds that registered in 2022, a year marked by serious fires in the southwest of the country. And the forecast is not particularly positive. Météo-France's meteorological alert map remains yellow in the south of the country, but it forecasts a return of intense heat at the end of next week.