France is fighting a wildfire of unprecedented scale on the edge of Bordeaux this morning, with 42,000 hectares burned, around 220,000 people evacuated and firefighters conceding they are still not in control of a blaze the Gironde prefecture has classed as a ‘megafire’. President Emmanuel Macron convened an interministerial crisis cell at the interior ministry at 10am.
The fire, which broke out at Saumos last Wednesday, is the defining front of a wider emergency burning across five departments. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said 115,000 hectares have burned across France since the start of the season, with 30 to 40 fires being fought on any given day and more than 13,000 outbreaks recorded since January.
Readers can follow the active fires in near real time on the public tracking map at gisfire.saro.app.
‘We are still not masters of the fire’
Rain overnight and a drop in the wind bought crews time, but the Gironde fire service was blunt this morning about where things stand. “We can’t say the fire is stabilised. We’ve stabilised a situation that was completely unstable, but we’re still not masters of the fire,” said Captain Wilfried Schneider of the SDIS 33, adding that the most active front now lies between Marcheprime and Pierroton, at the gates of the Bordeaux metropolitan area.
The prefecture reported the fire had remained broadly stable through the night, without major change, though it “continues its progression”. On the Cap-Ferret peninsula the picture is more fragile. “Unfortunately the weather conditions are not favourable to allow this fire to be brought under control,” said Philippe de Gonneville, mayor of Lège-Cap-Ferret, describing forestry works under way to slow the flames’ advance south along the peninsula. “The coming hours will be decisive.”
Government spokeswoman Maud Bregeon sought to calm fears about the city itself, telling franceinfo that “the evacuation of Bordeaux is not on the agenda as things stand”, while describing an exceptional and unpredictable fire. The mayor of Bordeaux, Thomas Cazenave, said the flames had come within around 15 kilometres of the city, prompting the partial closure of a major motorway.
84 firefighters injured, no civilian casualties
The Gironde prefecture said 84 firefighters have been injured since the blaze began, nine of them in the latest 24-hour period. No civilian has been killed or injured by the Gironde fire, a point the fire service has held onto through days of exhausting work. “There were zero injuries among our fellow citizens,” said Éric Brocardi, spokesman for France’s firefighters, adding that crews were far from demoralised. “They have fire in their bellies.”
Some 2,500 firefighters are engaged in the Gironde alone, supported by 1,500 soldiers, 1,200 police and gendarmes and 18 aircraft. The lieutenant-colonel coordinating part of the response, David Annotel, warned the fight would be long. The fire, he said, “will last several weeks, even several months before we can give the final message of the fire being out.”
A village of the displaced in Bordeaux
The human scale of the evacuation is becoming visible in the city’s public buildings. Between 2,500 and 3,000 people are now gathered at the Bordeaux exhibition park, where thousands of camp beds have been laid out across the halls and volunteers distribute food and water. More than fifteen schools and boarding establishments have been opened across Nouvelle-Aquitaine to take in evacuees, among them care-home residents and children from summer camps.
The economic toll is already being counted. Economy Minister Roland Lescure said more than 13,000 businesses had been evacuated in the Gironde, calling it “an economic thunderclap” for a region that did not need one, and confirmed that insurers had agreed to cover rehousing costs for up to three weeks for those displaced.
A crisis felt across the border
The fires are part of a wider southern European emergency. Across France and Spain, more than 300,000 people have been forced from their homes, with Spain battling what officials in the Madrid region have called the worst fires in its history. France has activated the EU civil protection mechanism, drawing in water-bombing aircraft and firefighting teams from Croatia, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania.
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Main photo of Gironde, credit: Sandrine Ricard