French President Emmanuel Macron called a crisis meeting Monday focusing on monster, uncontrolled wildfires that have forced more than 250,000 people to flee their homes, amid a first glimmer of hope that the spread of the largest blaze may have slowed.
In the Gironde region of southwest France, where flames have burned an area four times the size of Paris, the prefecture said the situation overnight had remained “globally stable” – a change from previous days when the giant blaze raging since last week had edged closer to the wine region city of Bordeaux.
In the adjacent southwestern Landes region, where hundreds of firefighters have been making progress against another virulent but smaller fire, the prefecture said some rain fell overnight and described the conditions as “favorable” for firefighting but also cautioned that they could change.
No new evacuations were announced. But with France about to enter its peak August tourist season, Gironde authorities took more steps to keep vacationers away, banning holiday camps for children and for people with disabilities.
On the ground and in the air, with water- and retardant-dropping aircraft, the massive firefighting effort was engaged in a race against time, battling to make progress before a forecast surge in temperatures from Tuesday that could make fighting flames more difficult.
The blazes have caused a “pyrocumulonimbus” to form — a giant fire cloud that can create its own winds and packs lightning and sometimes tornadoes that can cause more blazes, according to France’s national firefighters federation, who said the phenomenon had never before been seen in the country, French news agency AFP reports.
“It’s a David-versus-Goliath scenario. … At some point, we’ll find a weak spot and strike there,” the agency quotes federation spokesman Eric Brocardi as saying.
The government crisis meeting was scheduled for Monday morning, with Macron presiding. In a weekend post on X, he pledged long-term support for fire-hit communities, saying: “We will rebuild, we will repair and we will be present for as long as necessary.”
In Spain, wildfires have burned out of control around Madrid and in the Valencia region. Authorities evacuated 76,000 people and confined 30,000 others to their homes.
In both Spain and France, the exceptional scale of the fires – fueled by heat waves that hit especially hard and early this year, making forests and scrubland tinder-dry – are driving calls for stronger action against climate change.
“What we are experiencing is not a series of isolated incidents. It is the consequence of a climate emergency that is making wildfires even more violent, heat waves more frequent,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said.
Evacuees are fretting about what they’ll find when they’re allowed to return to fire-hit regions.
“It looked like the apocalypse. You couldn’t see anything. Everything was covered in ash,” said Rocío Domínguez, who evacuated with her dog, Simba, from Chapinería, west of Madrid.
“We don’t know when we get to the town, if we’ll have half the house burned down or we’ll have it intact or we won’t have a house,” she said. “All the clothes, all the memories, everything.”
