French authorities ordered nearly 4,000 more people to evacuate Atlantic coast tourist areas as a returning heat wave threatened firefighters’ tenuous hold on a vast wildfire west of Bordeaux. Across France and Spain, the fires have now displaced around 330,000 people, in what officials call an exceptional crisis.
The blaze in France’s Gironde region has burned an area described as four times the size of Paris, with about 420 square kilometres scorched locally and more than 1,160 square kilometres nationwide. Some 220,000 people have been evacuated in the region, an operation the interior minister said was very likely France’s largest civilian evacuation outside of wartime.
Spain has been hit just as hard, recording its largest wildfire on record in the Avila region at more than 500 square kilometres and about 1,530 square kilometres burned nationally. Tens of thousands of evacuees have been allowed to return even as the country braces for its fourth heat wave of the summer, with temperatures forecast above 40 degrees Celsius.
Firefighters have deployed 23 aircraft and helicopters, up from 18, and completed more than 100 kilometres of firebreaks, though at least 110 have been injured battling the flames. Gironde prefect Sophie Brocas warned the situation remained complicated and that crews were not out of the woods, while Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez linked the disaster to climate change.
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