French firefighters work tirelessly to stop blaze from spreading
Plumes of smoke rose above a vast sea of pine trees outside Bordeaux as firefighters in gleaming helmets rushed to douse emerging flames before they could spread.
“It’s intense, titanic,” said Florian Lointier of the Paris Fire Brigade, an army unit dispatched to southwest France to help exhausted crews tackle the huge wildfire.
More than 5,000 firefighters, military personnel, police officers and volunteers have been battling the ferocious blaze, which has forced one of the largest evacuations in France’s history and was 15 kilometres from Bordeaux’s suburbs.
FRANCE 24’s Camille Knight brings us more with this report.
115,000 hectares burned by fires in France this year, interior minister says
Some 115,000 hectares (284,000 acres) have burned in wildfires in France since the start of the year, “far more than anything we have seen in the past”, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said Sunday.
France is currently battling 30 to 40 wildfires daily, Nunez told France 2 television.
Conditions remained “very unfavourable” on major fronts, including the southwestern regions of Gironde and Landes, and in the Mediterranean Var region.
A total of 2,500 firefighters, including a Swiss firefighting team, 1,500 military personnel and around 1,200 police have been deployed to Gironde, Nuñez said earlier.
Spanish government to declare civil protection emergency
Sanchez said his government would on Tuesday declare a civil protection emergency for the central provinces plagued by the wildfires, unlocking additional recovery funding.
More than 150,000 hectares have burned across Spain since January, he said, six times the area destroyed during the same period last year.
While wildfires have long been a feature of Spain’s summers, Sanchez said their growing scale and intensity, fuelled by increasingly extreme weather, required policies grounded in climate science.
Macron will host a crisis cabinet meeting on Monday to discuss wildfires
French President Emmanuel Macron will chair a crisis cabinet meeting Monday morning to discuss the wildfires ravaging several areas of southwest France, his office said on Sunday.
The meeting is scheduled to take place at 11am.
Fire forces more than 400 people in Italy to evacuate by boat
Hundreds of people in Italy were evacuated by sea on Sunday as a wildfire swept through parts of the southern Adriatic coast, with many more expected to be rescued, the coastguard said.
“More than 400 tourists and beachgoers have been evacuated by sea, the only viable evacuation route,” the coastguard said on its WhatsApp channel, adding that operations were ongoing.
Evacuees were being rescued from the area around the town of Peschici in the southern Puglia region.
A coastguard spokesman told AFP that around 300 more people were expected to be evacuated.
“‘Six coastguard vessels, three boats from Italy’s financial police and around 10 private vessels were involved in the operation,” the coastguard said.
Images showed firefighters and a Canadair waterbomber battling the blaze, which was not immediately threatening homes in the town. A huge plume of smoke could be seen from dozens of kilometres away.
“The situation is currently under control,” Peschici mayor Luigi d’Arenzo was quoted as saying by local daily Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno.
Spain fires are some of the largest in the country’s recent history, official says
The wildfires ravaging areas around Spain’s capital Madrid have included the largest forest fire in the country’s recent history, a government official said on Sunday.
Sara Aagesen, Minister for Ecological Transition, told journalists the part of the wildfires affecting 50,000 hectares of the Avila area west of Madrid was “the largest forest fire in our country’s recent history”.
She did not define the extent of damage or burned land in the total of 77,000 hectares she said had been “affected” in the Madrid, Avila and Toledo regions hit by the wildfires.
‘No return to evacuated regions until the fire is under control’, Gironde top official says
“It will not be possible for evacuated communities to return until the fire is under control,” the top official of the Gironde region, Sophie Brocas, said during a press briefing.
Her statement confirmed earlier comments by Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez.
Brocas said temperatures were set to rise again on Tuesday, which could worsen the situation.
She also urged workers in non-evacuated areas not to travel through evacuated communities to reach their jobs.
French firefighters face ‘fire-breathing dragon of clouds’
The gigantic wildfire in southwest France has created an extremely dangerous “pyrocumulonimbus”, a phenomenon never before seen in the country, the spokesman for the country’s National Firefighters Federation of France (FNSPF) told AFP.
The cloud formation occurs when intense wildfires roast the air near the ground, causing it to rise quickly and then become a fire cloud, which in turn generates its own wind and can worsen fires. If it grows very large, it can even cause lightning. The phenomenon also occurs during volcanic eruptions.
NASA calls them “fire-breathing dragon of clouds”.
“We don’t know how the blaze will spread, the fire front is constantly shifting. We cannot fight it directly. It’s a David-versus-Goliath scenario,” said FNSPF spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Eric Brocardi.
“Salvation will come either from the sky – in the form of rain, though it would need to pour heavily for three days – or by finding a way to steer the fire toward a place where it will die out on its own. The sea, for example.”
Paris Saint-Germain football team expresses support for firefighters
“We send strength to the firefighters and all of those working tirelessly to protect the public and our regions,” the team wrote on X.
French farmers provide water tankers to help fight fire
“Civilian farmers are trying to help firefighters by bringing in tankers of water to keep their hoses running,” FRANCE 24 reporter Luke Shrago said, reporting from Lège-Cap-Ferret, where one of the largest forest fires France has seen since WWII is still blazing.
France roads and rail cut by fires
With high winds spreading flames in the giant Gironde wildfire, 60 kilometres of the main A63 highway from Bordeaux to the Spanish border has been closed, regional authorities said.
The SNCF rail company said it had also halted train traffic for about 100 kilometres south of Bordeaux.
French firefighters battle blazes with military cargo planes
Fire crews in France are battling unchecked wildfires that have forced more than 300,000 people to flee and were overwhelmed on Sunday as the unpredictable blazes advanced.
To help stop the flames from spreading, a giant A400M military cargo aircraft has been converted for firefighting in southwest France. Swooping low over arid, fire-threatened woodlands, the plane dropped a long plume of ochre-coloured retardant.
FRANCE 24’s Charlotte Hughes tells us more about the techniques being used by French firefighters.
Spain’s King laments ‘incalculable’ natural damage from wildfires
Spain’s King Felipe VI on Sunday said wildfires ravaging the countryside around Madrid and other areas had caused “incalculable” damage to the nation’s natural heritage.
Around 75,000 residents have been evacuated from the Madrid region, Avila, Toledo and the eastern region of Castellon in Valencia.
Officials say overnight progress had been made containing the blazes even though difficulties still lay ahead.
“Some have had a very bad time, some have been away from their homes for four days now, some have lost many possessions. Collectively, we have lost an incalculable amount of natural heritage,” the king told reporters on a visit to a shelter for those evacuated in Madrid.
Bordeaux is ‘ready for anything’, mayor says
The mayor of Bordeaux in southwest France said authorities had no current plans to evacuate the population of the UNESCO-listed city due to raging forest fires but were “ready for anything”.
“We’re very vigilant. We’re ready for anything,” Bordeaux mayor Thomas Cazenave said, adding that there were no current plans to move the city’s 270,000 residents.
“The fire is further south,” he told reporters at a shelter for people displaced by the wildfires.
“It is still on the edge of the metropolitan area, but it is not advancing on the western side of the metropolis,” he said. He estimated that the flames raged between 25 and 30 kilometres from the city itself and around 15 kilometres from the metropolitan area near the town of Martignas-sur-Jalle.
The town of 8,000 people, located on the far western edge of the metropolitan area, has been evacuated.
Residents to return to Scots village near Cairngorms wildfire
Evacuated residents of a village in Scotland threatened by a wildfire were to go back home Sunday, after authorities said a major incident had ended.
Around 650 people from Nethy Bridge in the Cairngorms national park were told to leave Friday “as a precaution”, as authorities battled a blaze which spread across some 600 hectares.
More than 500 firefighters with helicopters were deployed to battle the fire that had been burning for 11 days in the mountain park west of Aberdeen, which has long been a tourist attraction.
The region has seen weeks of dry weather, as much of Britain experiences an exceptionally hot summer with three heatwaves already recorded.
“Thanks to the efforts of fire crews … and many others over the past 24 hours, there is no longer the immediate threat which prompted the evacuation of properties in Nethy Bridge,” Police Scotland Superintendent Judy Hill said late Saturday.
She added that significant resources and volunteers were continuing to work in “challenging circumstances to extinguish the fires”.
The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service said late Saturday that 75 firefighters remained on the ground tackling the remaining flames near Nethy Bridge.
Fire whirlwinds hamper France’s response
A total of 2,500 firefighters, including a Swiss firefighting team, 1,500 military personnel and around 1,200 police have been deployed to battle the blazes in the southwestern department of Gironde, French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said in a post on X.
Spain’s PM urges national ‘climate emergency’ pact
Spain needs a national pact on the “climate emergency”, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said as he visited the wildfire zone west of Madrid.
The disaster needs to lead to “a major public pact on the climate emergency” that would align central government and regional administrations, the left-wing leader said, hammering a proposal he had been fighting for before the fires erupted.
Spain PM Sanchez says ‘difficult hours’ ahead but ‘positive’ developments in wildfire containment
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said difficult hours lay ahead in the fight against the country’s wildfires, but officials had seen positive developments in controlling the blazes around Madrid.
“Difficult hours lie ahead admittedly, but the update we received here … indicates that the night was very positive regarding the fire’s progression, its containment, and the firefighting efforts,” Sanchez told reporters on a visit to the Avila area affected by fires.
‘A devastating resurgence of the fire’: Wildfires come within 20km of Bordeaux
FRANCE 24 reporter Luke Shrago shares the latest from the Gironde region in southwestern France, where an area around half the size of New York City has been burned up by raging wildfires.
