Wildfires Threaten Bordeaux as 300,000+ Leave Homes in France and Spain

Thousands of French firefighters are tackling intense wildfires approaching the city of Bordeaux on Monday as tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from the surrounding Gironde department.

Both France and Spain have been hit with a new wave of dangerous wildfires across their territories over the past days that have burned through tens of thousands of hectares and collectively forced the evacuation of more than 300,000 individuals.

The fires have burnt through 42,000 hectares and forced the evacuation of around 220,000 people in southwestern France’s Gironde region, Le Figaro reports.

According to French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, 2,500 firefighters, 1,500 military personnel, and 1,200 police officers have been deployed to Gironde to face the ongoing emergency.

“At the start of the night [Sunday], in Gironde, the fire became extremely virulent and unpredictable again, generating its own wind and spreading erratically toward the Bordeaux metropolitan area,” Minister Nuñez said. “By the end of the night, it had calmed down somewhat. The area burned now stands at 42,000 hectares.”

At press time, the fires are reportedly nine miles away from the southern edges of the city of Bordeaux as of Monday morning. The situation prompted the further evacuation of residents of nearby towns such as Cestas on Sunday — however, Bordeaux’s Mayor Thomas Cazenave ruled out any plans to evacuate the city in remarks shared with reporters.

Although the situation remains far from controlled. Gironde’s local authority informed through an early Monday morning statement that the fires remained “broadly stable overnight, with no major developments.”

“Security and emergency services remain fully mobilized and are continuing their operations on the ground,” the Gironde local authority said.

French Firefighter Captain Nicolas Braz described the wildfire to AFP as a “pyrocumulonimbus,”  a fire cloud capable of generating its own winds and whirlwinds — making it “erratic and unmanageable.”

A crisis cabinet meeting led by French President Emmanuel Macron was summoned for Monday to address the ongoing wildfire emergency. Speaking with France 2 television on Sunday, Interior Minister Nuñez reportedly described the situation as “far more than anything we have seen int he past, ” and detailed that 115,000 hectares have burned through France since the start of the year.

Nuñez stressed that the European country is facing between 30 to 40 wildfires per day.

“We have a fire ​that is not under control and which is moving in the direction of the [Bordeaux] city area,” Nuñez said, per Reuters, describing the situation as “very unfavorable.”

The BBC reports that another heatwave expected soon hit France is poised to further complicate firefighters’s efforts.

Eric Brocardi, a spokesman for France’s National Firefighters Federation, said that it would need to “heavily” rain for three days in order to control the fire.

The wildfires in Spain, on the other hand, have reportedly burned some 77,000 hectares in Madrid and in the province of Avila. According to the public broadcaster RTVE, the fires are evolving “positively” yet, “very slowly.”

In Avila, the region most affected, the wildfires have been described by Spanish outlets as the worst of its kind in recent Spanish history, with about 50,000 hectares burned. More than 90,000 people reportedly remain evacuated or confined in Madrid, Ávila and Toledo as of Monday morning.