France deploys massive cargo aircraft to dump flame retardant on wildfire

LEGE-CAP FERRET, France (AP) — France was preparing to use a massive specially adapted cargo aircraft to dump flame retardants Saturday on a wildfire that has forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people, including from some suburbs of the wine region city of Bordeaux.

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said the hulking A400M aircraft will join what is expected to be a “long and very difficult” battle against the blaze raging in the Gironde region of western France.

That blaze and another wildfire in the Landes region have together forced 197,000 people to evacuate, he said.

With winds expected to shift in a westerly direction on Saturday afternoon, potentially driving the fire closer to Bordeaux, fire crews and authorities were digging trenches, using retardants and taking other steps to block it, Nunez said. He said the fire was about 30 kilometers (20 miles) west of the city.

The government mobilized soldiers to join the battle against the flames and rushed in 1.5 million face masks to protect against choking smoke.

The prefect of the Gironde region that includes Bordeaux ordered the evacuation of parts of three of the city’s western suburbs. Other towns and villages further west of the city were also ordered to evacuate.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu described the fires as unprecedented and said the Gironde blaze had become so strong that it was generating its own winds.

“Our priority is clear: protecting human lives,” he posted on X, adding that evacuation orders “must be respected without delay.”

He said firefighting teams were being reinforced Saturday with the addition of hundreds of soldiers and that breathing masks to filter out smoke particles were being rushed to the Gironde region for those exposed to the clouds of potentially noxious fumes.

All told, massive forest fires have forced the evacuation of more that 260,000 people in southwestern France and central Spain.

Blazes caught authorities off guard

The virulence of the wildfires, fueled by high temperatures and the long-term effects of climate change, caught fire crews and authorities off guard in both countries. Firefighters in Spain said the blazes spread so fast and violently that they could not be tackled head on. In France, some people even fled by boat when flames swept through touristic towns on the Atlantic coast.

Dozens of French firefighters have been injured, authorities said, but no deaths were reported in either country despite the scenes of panic as townsfolk fled by car and police went door to door to tell people to leave as large plumes of smoke darkened the skies.

Successive heat waves that hit unusually early and hard this year, baking Europe with record-shattering high temperatures, have turned forests and scrublands into tinderboxes.

Fires have burned 130,000 hectares of forest already this year in Spain, up from an annual average of 100,000 hectares over the past decade, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Saturday as he visited a command post west of Madrid.

He said more favorable weather Saturday offered “a window of opportunity” for fire crews to bring the blazes under control. Madrid’s regional government said the fires decreased in intensity as winds and temperatures dropped.

Other European nations were helping. Italy said two of its Canadair water-dumping firefighting planes deployed to Spain. Spain’s Civil Protection Service said it was expecting the arrival Saturday of two others from Greece, to join aircraft from the Netherlands and Portugal already deployed in Spain.

France was expecting two water-bombers from Croatia as well as two other planes from Portugal and two heavy-lift Black Hawk helicopters from the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Wildfire headed toward Bordeaux

Gironde region prefect Sophie Brocas said on Friday night that strong winds from the west were pushing the fire closer to the Bordeaux metropolitan area and that it had grown to “an unprecedented magnitude.”

“The scale of the fire changed,” she said. “To combat it, we will receive extremely significant national reinforcements. Reinforcements in firefighters, of course, reinforcements in military personnel, reinforcements in healthcare workers, reinforcements in experts. So, we are going to form a much larger team to face this extraordinary fire.”

People covered by the evacuation orders were being sent special alerts to their mobile phones, giving them instructions to leave.

“We want everyone to be quickly brought to safety. We must act quickly together,” Brocas said.

The Gironde blaze broke out Wednesday near the Cap Ferret peninsula on France’s Atlantic coast, located 60 kilometers (37 miles) from Bordeaux.

“It’s quite impressive and even frightening,” said Laurent Moretti, a resident in the town of Arès. “An evacuation on this scale has never happened before. All we really hope is that the firefighters can quickly get it under control.”

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Leicester reported from Paris. Associated Press journalist Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal, contributed.