Multiple fires hit the tourist regions of southern France on Thursday afternoon. Hundreds of firefighters were deployed.
Fueled by “extreme weather conditions”, with a strong mistral and soils suffering from an early drought, multiple fires hit the tourist regions of southern France on Thursday afternoon, forcing firefighters to deploy hundreds of firefighters. men and significant air resources.
In the green massif of the Cévennes, north of the Gard, a fire “in very unfavorable evolution” “in dense vegetation”, towards the remote hamlet of Bordezac, worried the firefighters at the end of the afternoon. “This fire is, how to say, a mega fire”, thus explained to AFP the commander Tanguy Slgagues, in charge of communication of the firefighters of Gard, according to whom “several hundred hectares have already been burned”.
“Villages will probably be impacted by the fire in the hours to come”, even feared this official: “It is an extremely unfavorable and very critical situation in the area, because the wind does not calm down and it is not not going to calm down tomorrow! We do not see how for the moment we will be able to stop this fire. (…) It will continue this night and several days”. “It is not impossible that the villages on the edge of the forest have houses impacted by the fire,” he warned.
In the same area, a first fire started in the town of Générac, earlier in the afternoon, mobilized 120 firefighters in the face of a fire which at the end of the day had already devoured 150 hectares of low vegetation and pines.
In the south-east of France where the first tourists are flocking at the start of the summer holidays, some 35 fire starts had to be treated during the day by the firefighters of the Bouches-du-Rhône department. And in particular in Arles, around noon, with a fire starting from reeds and brushwood in a commercial area.
Driven by a strong mistral, the fire had quickly spread to finally jump National 113, a strategic axis ensuring the junction of the A54 motorway between Nîmes and Marseille, and cut it in both directions.
In the area, four Canadair and up to 185 firefighters engaged in a kind of “urban guerrilla warfare” all afternoon to “do everything” to prevent the fire from reaching nearby homes or businesses. At least eight houses were damaged but several hundred could be saved, according to firefighters. The gusts reached up to 85 km / h Thursday in the Bouches-du-Rhône, where the prefecture had prohibited access to the 25 massifs of the department, from the National Park of the creeks to the Alpilles very close to Arles.