The Gironde fire has forced 220,000 people out and it's now heading for Bordeaux
The wildfire that started near Saumos has burned roughly 42,000 hectares, triggered mass evacuations across southwest France and is closing on the Bordeaux metro area. Around three thousand Portuguese live in the affected zone.
Around 220,000 people have already been moved out of their homes in southwest France because of the Gironde wildfire, and the fire keeps walking in the one direction nobody wanted: towards greater Bordeaux.
It started on 22 July near Saumos and found exactly the fuel it should not have found — the unbroken pine forest of the Landes, bone dry after weeks of heat. Within days a local fire became a regional emergency, with roughly 42,000 hectares burned and a front that swings with the wind. The Cap-Ferret peninsula had to be emptied by road and by boat, which tells you the real problem: there is no longer an obvious escape route.
Is Bordeaux itself in danger?
The city is not burning, but it is in the path. French interior minister Laurent Nuñez said authorities would do everything possible to protect Bordeaux — the kind of sentence you only say once the possibility has stopped being theoretical. Thousands of evacuees are sleeping in improvised shelters, in sports halls and exhibition centres scattered across the southwest.
Are there Portuguese people in the affected area?
Plenty. An estimated three thousand Portuguese nationals live inside the evacuation zone, part of a community that settled around Bordeaux decades ago through construction, restaurants and the wine trade. For a lot of families this isn’t foreign news — it’s a phone call asking whether the house is still standing.
Portugal had already sent two water-bombers to help fight the French fires earlier in this wave, through a European civil protection mechanism that has been working both ways this summer. And the same weather pattern feeding the Gironde is what has nearly all of mainland Portugal under a yellow heat warning on Tuesday — Iberia and southwest France are living through the same summer.
Anyone with family in the area can check consular guidance and emergency contacts through Portugal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which keeps its information for residents abroad up to date.
The grim part of this story is the calendar: August hasn’t even started.
Image: Original: Unknown Vector: SKopp / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
