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Bordeaux wildfire crisis
President Emmanuel Macron attended an emergency cabinet meeting to coordinate efforts to contain massive wildfires ravaging southwest France as early signs emerged that the blazes may be starting to slow.
“The fight against the megafire in southwestern France remains critical and 'very unfavorable,' acknowledged this Sunday by French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez”
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said the wildfires had not “progressed during the night” but cautioned authorities had to remain “very concentrated, very determined, to go at any moment.”
Bordeaux Mayor Thomas Cazenave said on Sunday that the fire “is still at the gates of the metropolitan area,” with flames at their closest point 15km from metropolitan Bordeaux, home to about 850,000 people.
The Gironde provincial authority said the situation remained “broadly stable,” while Jerome Steffe, mayor of Cestas, described the blaze as “a fire of a size never seen before.”
Evacuations and competing frames
As the fire threatened Bordeaux, the mayor said authorities had no current plans to evacuate the UNESCO-listed city and told reporters, “We're very vigilant,” while estimating the flames were between 25 and 30 kilometres from the city itself.
RFI quoted Guillaume Millet of the Gironde fire and rescue service saying, “This is a fire that makes no sense. It has no direction,” and added that the fire was still on the edge of the metropolitan area near Martignas-sur-Jalle.
Other outlets framed the scale of displacement differently, with CBC saying a raging wildfire forced the evacuation of 55,000 people overnight Sunday and bringing the total forced out of their homes to 220,000 in one region alone.
CBC also reported that Bordeaux Mayor Thomas Cazenave described the blaze as being “at the gates of the metropolitan area,” about 15 kilometres away at its closest point, while saying an evacuation of Bordeaux was not on the cards for now.
What’s at stake next
The sources tied the next phase of the crisis to weather and firefighting capacity, with Al Jazeera noting that forecasts of another heatwave added urgency to Monday’s meeting and that the blazes had already triggered pyrocumulonimbus clouds.
“President Emmanuel Macron has attended an emergency cabinet meeting to coordinate efforts to contain massive wildfires ravaging southwest France, as early signs emerged that the blazes may be starting to slow”
Al Jazeera reported that “This is a fire of a size never seen before,” and described how huge fire-generated clouds can produce thunderstorms and carry hot air, smoke and moisture into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS).
In parallel, La Vanguardia said the fire near Burdeos had already devastated at least 42.000 hectáreas and was not controlled but had entered a more stable phase thanks to “la clemencia del viento y algo de lluvia durante la noche del domingo al lunes.”
La Vanguardia also warned that firefighters wanted to use the “ligero respiro meteorológico” before a new heat wave from Tuesday, with temperatures that can reach 40 grados centígrados, and said the long-term worry centered on the “abultada factura del desastre.”
