More than 300,000 flee wildfires raging across France and Spain

New Delhi: More than 300,000 people have fled their homes in France and Spain as wind-driven wildfires continue to burn out of control for a fourth day. Teams of fire crews warn that they are still far from bringing the flames under control.

The worst-hit area is France’s south-western Gironde department, where a blaze has grown so intense that it is generating its own weather system, complete with whirlwinds that firefighters describe as erratic and unmanageable. Flames have advanced to within roughly 30 kilometres of Bordeaux, prompting a fresh evacuation order for parts of three suburbs on the city’s western fringe late on Saturday.

France mobilizes military

French authorities have put the combined evacuation figure for Gironde and neighbouring Landes at close to 250,000, although some news agencies citing the country’s interior minister, Laurent Nunez, gave a slightly lower running total of around 197,000 as the numbers continued to shift through the day. About 7,000 evacuees have been sheltering at the Parc des Expositions exhibition centre in Bordeaux, sleeping on cots with children and pets after being woken by emergency phone alerts in the early hours.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has ordered the armed forces into the response, with troops deployed to cut brush and dig fire breaks alongside civilian crews. The country’s prime minister, Sebastien Lecornu, who chaired an emergency meeting of the interior, defence, health, transport and environment ministers, said the fires had reached a scale never before seen in France.

Authorities were preparing to deploy a specially adapted A400M military transport aircraft to drop flame retardant over the Gironde blaze on July 26.

France has burned close to 98,000 hectares since the start of the year, according to Nunez, with the Gironde fire alone having consumed more than 12,500 hectares. Officials have advised against road and rail travel to the affected region; Bordeaux airport has stayed open, though train and bus links have been disrupted.

The disruption has reached even into sport. Organizers shortened Sunday’s final stage of the Tour de France from 133 kilometres to 89 kilometres so that police normally assigned to the race could be redirected to the fire zones.

Germany has offered assistance, with chancellor Friedrich Merz saying Berlin would send helicopters, an A400 transport aircraft and rescue personnel, and that he remained in contact with Macron.

Toll rises in Spain as first death confirmed

Spain has declared a state of emergency, and the prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, has warned of complex times ahead even as a shift in weather brought some relief to crews battling fires outside Madrid on Sunday. Authorities in Valencia confirmed the country’s first fatality of the crisis: a man believed to be in his seventies was found dead in his car by firefighters extinguishing a blaze in the Salt de l’Aigua ravine in Manises.

The Spanish interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, described the outlook as more pessimistic than the previous day, saying wind gusts were expected to push flames southward overnight. Madrid’s regional president, Isabel Diaz Ayuso, called it the worst fire in the region’s history.

Nearly 60,000 people have been evacuated from the Madrid and Ávila regions since the fires broke out, with more than 28,000 confined to their homes, Spain’s interior ministry said. At least eight municipalities near Toledo were ordered to evacuate late on Saturday, with the final number of affected residents still unclear. Bulldozers have been cutting fire breaks around residential areas such as El Tiemblo, roughly 80 kilometres west of Madrid.

Sanchez said 130,000 hectares had burned in Spain so far this year, well above the decade’s annual average of 100,000 hectares.

European picture points to a record season

The fires are not confined to the Iberian peninsula and south-western France. More than 350 fires, including ten major blazes, broke out on the Italian island of Sicily, prompting evacuations, while emergency services in Scotland declared a major incident on Friday over a wildfire that has been burning in the Cairngorms National Park for 10 days.

The EU’s commissioner for crisis management, Hadja Lahbib, told the BBC that this year’s damage was likely to exceed previous records, noting that the Netherlands had already triggered the EU’s civil protection mechanism as early as April. She said one million hectares had burned across Europe last summer and that this season had started earlier, with forecasters predicting a further heatwave that could spark more fires.

France has activated the EU mechanism and is due to receive three Canadair water bombers from Croatia, two Air Tractor aircraft from Portugal, Black Hawk helicopters from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and 40 personnel from a Romanian forest-fire team. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said 11 aircraft in total had been sent to France and Spain from the bloc’s firefighting fleet, with Spain separately expecting four more water-dumping aircraft from Italy and Greece.

Scientists cited by international news agencies have linked the intensity of this year’s fires to a pattern of prolonged dry spells and successive heatwaves across Europe, consistent with the broader effects of climate change.