“We prepare the business and we leave! “: in a district of La Teste-de-Buch, the trunks are overflowing with bags and suitcases. Some 16,000 people were evacuated Monday in a few hours in Gironde, under scorching heat, to flee the smoke from the two fires which have ravaged more than 15,000 hectares of forest since Tuesday. “We felt it coming since Sunday,” explained a retired couple to AFP before retreating to the neighboring town of Arcachon.
In scorching temperatures, with 41.2°C recorded in Arcachon, rotating winds and under a sky that turned gray yellow, some 8,000 people had to leave Les Miquelots and Pyla-sur-Mer, districts of La Teste-de -Buch, a town of 28,000 inhabitants, very large and very wooded, where 5,000 hectares have gone up in smoke. In the other disaster area, in Landiras in the south of the Gironde, around 8,000 people also had to leave their homes behind on Monday, in six municipalities. The fire has already devoured 10,500 hectares of forest there.
“We evacuated as many people on Monday as in the previous six days”, for a total of 32,000 preventive evacuations because of these “spreading” fires, said the prefect of Gironde Fabienne Buccio. The five campsites from which 6,000 holidaymakers had been evacuated on Wednesday night, at the foot of the Dune du Pilat, “90% burned”, she added. In this sector of the highest in Europe, an AFP journalist heard many explosions, due to the combustion of gas cylinders left in the deserted campsites.
Several evacuation operations
At Miquelots, Patricia Monteil is “in panic”. “I’m going to my daughter’s (in another district of La Teste) but if it burns there too, I don’t know what to do”, slips this forty-year-old, piling as many things as possible in her car, especially clothes. Ashes begin to fly through the air. In the distance, the fire sirens sound, in a strong smell of burning. Anaïs, she roams the neighborhood looking for her parents’ five cats but has only found one: “I think we’re going to have to leave them here”.
“The evacuation should allow the firefighters to concentrate on attacking the fire,” Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Mendousse, spokesman for the firefighters, told AFP, who assured that “La Teste is not not threatened and that there is no risk for the population”.
At the Arcachon basin zoo in La Teste, an evacuation of the animals began on Monday, noted an AFP journalist. For the French Association of Zoological Parks, “it is a unique operation of its kind” which should make it possible to withdraw animals, in particular those sensitive to smoke such as primates, towards Pessac, near Bordeaux. At the hippodrome of the city, it is planned to evacuate 370 horses to Bordeaux or Pau, according to Céline Bobacher, a manager, who describes “a gray sky, a very thick fog, like a time of war”.
“Extremely unfavorable” conditions for firefighters
Faced with “exceptional” blazes and in hellish heat (42.4°C recorded in Cazaux, a village in La Teste evacuated on Friday), some 1,700 firefighters are mobilized in Gironde. “We saw phenomena that foresters have never seen before. The fire literally explodes, linked to the heat and the calorific potential present. The 40-year-old pine trunks are bursting, ”describes the departmental director of Sdis 33, Marc Vermeulen. With a new change in wind direction expected overnight and “gusts to 80 km / h”, the conditions are “extremely unfavorable”, according to firefighters.
At the end of the day, the air resources present in Gironde had to be redeployed in the Landes where another fire broke out. “Priority to emerging fire is the rule”, explained the prefect. “But we don’t let ourselves be defeated, the fire doesn’t do what it wants, we thwart it. We build firewalls, ditches”. Fabienne Buccio however also warned that the night from Monday to Tuesday “will be very complicated”.