A month after a gigantic blaze began in south-west France, the blaze erupted again and had already engulfed 6,000 hectares of forest on Wednesday, causing 8,000 people to evacuate.
• Also read: The water war began in France with the drought
France is currently being hit by a new heat wave that is making a historic drought worse every day. In general, it is less hot than during the mid-July heatwave, when many records were broken in several regions with thermometers exceeding 40 degrees Celsius.
Within 24 hours, the fire that broke out on Tuesday afternoon in Saint-Magne, in the Gironde department, destroyed at a galloping pace 6,000 hectares of forest in that sector, as well as in Hostens and Belin.-Béliet, not far from the neighboring Landes department detected.
“Very strong”, said Martin Guespereau, Delegate Prefect of the Gironde, it continued throughout the night south-east of Landiras, scene of a gigantic fire on July 12th.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who was traveling on another front of fires in the department of Aveyron (South), expressed on Wednesday “the great suspicion that the fire, which has resumed, is the work of arsonists”.
“This morning, between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m., there were eight fires that started a few hundred meters apart, which is quite unusual,” specified the Minister, recalling that “nine out of ten fires were caused by criminal or involuntary ( human) origin”.
“Fed up”
The gendarmerie, for their part, announced that they would intensify “the fight against the arsonists”. On Tuesday alone, “there were 40 arson attacks” in the Gironde, some of which were “criminal in origin”, explained Mr Guespereau.
The minister announced the increase in resources with the pledge of “more than 1,000 firefighters, nine aircraft and two water bomber helicopters”.
The thick smoke obscured the sky enough to obscure views of the A63 motorway linking Bordeaux to Bayonne on the border with Spain, prompting authorities to cut it locally in both directions.
According to the Gironde Prefecture, the preventive evacuation of Beliet, a town of around 2,500 inhabitants, was “underway” on Wednesday afternoon, bringing the number of evacuees in southern Gironde and the Landes “to almost 8,000” since Tuesday. As in July, community halls were opened to welcome them.
“People are worried but disciplined. However, it is fed up, enough is enough,” says Vincent Ichard, mayor of Moustey (Landes), from which 250 of the 680 residents have been evacuated. “Being surrounded by flames, we had never seen that, it’s beyond us”.
The Delegate Prefect of Gironde also mentioned “very difficult situations for people” already evacuated in July, “who find this depressing situation”.
Fire lurks in the peat
The Landiras fire, which devastated around 14,000 hectares of forest in July without claiming any casualties, has “never been declared extinguished” and is still being closely monitored.
But according to the prefecture, it resumed on Tuesday thanks to “extremely unfavorable weather, due to the heat wave, due to the drought of the air, due to the historical record for the drought of vegetation and due to the fact that we have a lot of peat here (in the ground ), meaning that the July fire had not stopped, (…) It had buried itself».
“In this type of forest that has not yet been thinned”, with “pines between 5 and 10 years old, very numerous and all glued together”, “the fire goes out very quickly and has a very high heating potential”, explained the lieutenant colonel of the fire brigade Arnaud Mendousse.
Sixteen homes have been destroyed so far, according to firefighters who were able to save “a number” of other homes.
The Gironde had been ravaged by two “outstanding” fires in mid-July, that of Landiras (40km south of Bordeaux) and a second at Teste-de-Buch in the Arcachon Basin, which had engulfed 20 800 hectares of forest, leading to the evacuation of led more than 36,000 people.