Forest between the towns of Marcheprime and Cestas just a few miles southwest of Bordeaux, burns on Sunday night. Photo by Amael Dubiez/Gironde Department Fire and Rescue Service/EPA
July 27 (UPI) — Massive wildfires in France and Spain killed one person and forced the evacuation of hundreds of thousands with a blaze in France’s southwestern Gironde region advancing to within 10 miles of Bordeaux, a city of about 850,000 people.
French President Emmanuel Macron called a crisis meeting Monday morning to address the country’s response to the wildfire west of Bordeaux that has seen 220,000 residents and tourists and 13,000 businesses evacuated and burned through more than 100,000 acres.
The fire in the Gironde region caused a huge fire-thunderstorm fed by its own winds and lightning — a so-called pyrocumulonimbus — according to authorities, amid concerns the situation could be about to get worse due to a heat wave, the fourth of the summer, forecast to hit France on Tuesday.
“We don’t know how the blaze will spread, the fire front is constantly shifting. We cannot fight it directly,” said National Firefighters Federation of France spokesman Eric Brocardi.
Brocardi said it was “a race against time” and that it needed to rain “heavily for three days” to bring the fire under control.
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez, in an online post Sunday night, described the fire as “extremely virulent and unpredictable, generating its own winds and advancing erratically toward the Bordeaux metropolitan area.”
He said 2,500 firefighters, including a Swiss team, and 18 firefighting aircraft were battling the wildfire along with 1,500 military personnel as well as 1,200 police and gendarmes carrying out evacuations and assisting with rescue and patrol operations.
Another 39,000 people have been evacuated from wildfires in the Landes region and Vars region on the Cote d’Azur which were being tackled by more than 2,100 firefighters and police, said Nunez, who noted there were many other wildfires across the country from Hautes-Alpes to the island of Corsica.
In Spain, more than 100,000 people have been evacuated from wildfires that have burned almost 200,000 acres west of Madrid and in the northeastern Valencia region where a man was killed and five people were injured in the Valencia suburb of Manises, the municipal council said in a statement posted on X.
The government official with responsibility for Valencia, Pilar Bernabe, described the main wildfire in the northern Castellon province as “very intense” and said she was very concerned because weather conditions were forecast to get significantly hotter over the coming days.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was scheduled to travel to Valencia on Monday to visit the areas worst affected.
Speaking at a climate conference in Madrid, Sanchez said what was happening in Spain showed the “climate emergency kills,” vowing his government would address the root causes, do a better job of anticipating the impacts and speed up the country’s energy transition to renewable power.
“What we are living through is not a series of isolated incidents. It is the most painful manifestation of a climate emergency that is making wildfires more voracious and heatwaves more frequent, and, as a result, our land more vulnerable. It is no longer an exception. It is the rule,” said Sanchez.
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