The flames continue to wreak havoc in Gironde, where a new fire, after the terrible summer fires, has already covered 1,300 hectares since Monday and caused the evacuation of several hundred people.
The disaster is still in progress Tuesday morning in the town of Saumos, a village located between the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean, near the seaside resort of Lacanau, and the Bordeaux conurbation which broke heat records on Monday.
Four houses burned down and to protect the population, around 540 people have been evacuated since Monday evening, in the town center of Saumos and hamlets in the neighboring town of Sainte-Hélène, according to the prefecture.
Major fires had already burned 30,000 hectares in July and August in La Teste-de-Buch and Landiras in Gironde.
The area covered by the flames tripled overnight. Monday evening, the sub-prefect of Lesparre-Médoc, Fabrice Thibier, had mentioned “a turning wind and a fire surface difficult to master”.
It rained in the area for half an hour after midnight, according to AFP journalists on the spot, but that was not enough to calm the fire, described as“quite virulent” by firefighters.
The communication manager present on site, Thomas Couturier, mentioned “a rather intense night”.
Very strong gusts of rotating wind projected incandescent elements into the sky, and the intervention of firefighters to protect homes was complicated by garden fences.
Heat wave
“More than 340 firefighters from the department and the area are currently mobilized, and will be gradually joined in the morning by reinforcements from other departments”specifies the prefecture of Gironde in its last point of information Tuesday morning. “Two Canadairs, a Dash and three water bomber helicopters are engaged this morning”.
Flights must resume from 9:00 a.m. According to Mr. Couturier, reinforcements must arrive from neighboring departments, but also from the Rhône-Alpes-Auvergne and Grand-Est regions.
The operations command post had to be moved from Saumos to the nearby village of Temple, where schools serve as resting places for firefighters. The multipurpose room has been transformed into a canteen, where volunteers serve meals.
Once again, the wind carries the smell of fire far: the firefighters of Charente-Maritime, a neighboring department of Gironde to the north, received numerous calls reporting the smell of smoke several tens of kilometers from the disaster.
In the Landes, another smaller fire destroyed 45 hectares of forest late Monday afternoon in Herm, northwest of Dax.
No homes were evacuated. An emergency vehicle was burned in the operations and a firefighter injured in an ankle, according to the prefecture of the department.
Monday was feared by firefighters in the region because of a new heat wave, due to a rise in hot air from Morocco, according to Météo-France.
Monthly temperature records, sometimes half a century old, have been broken in several municipalities.
The thermometer exceeded 40 degrees in places in the Landes, and it was 37.5 ° C in Bordeaux, unheard of since 1987.
In the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, with a temperature of 38.9°C, the city of Pau had not been so hot in September since 1970.