Climate change is making megafires more common, with potentially dire economic consequences.
Nayla Razzouk, Clara Hernanz Lizarraga, Sabrina Nelson Garcinuño, Olivia Rudgard, Joe Wertz, Raeedah Wahid and Vivien Ngo for Bloomberg News
In a forest near Lège-Cap-Ferret, west of Bordeaux, Matthieu Jomain directs his crews as they fire water jets into the vegetation. Dense gray smoke seeps along the forest floor.
A commander in the Gironde firefighting force, Jomain deployed to the region last week, and quickly realized that this wasn’t a normal fire. It was moving fast, changing in direction and intensity as it spread. On Friday night, as his team traveled between the upscale resort area of Cap Ferret and Bordeaux, they were caught by surprise by a wall of flames and had to fight their way out.
“This is war against the wildfires,” he said. “I have been a firefighter for 26 years and I have never seen wildfires of this magnitude.”
The Gironde wildfire began on July 22 and spread with unprecedented speed, ripping through forests and across the countryside, burning roughly 420 square kilometers (162 square miles) and destroying around 200 homes. It is a fire so large that it began to warp the weather around it, generating its own windstorms. More than 220,000 people were evacuated, as firefighters battled to contain the blaze and stop it reaching the western suburbs of Bordeaux.
Around the same time that the French fire began, two separate blazes started in a rural area southwest of Madrid. They merged on the weekend, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee for safety. Greece, Portugal, Italy, the UK and Albania are all struggling with wildfires too, the consequence of four successive heatwaves across the continent that turned landscapes into tinderboxes, and a confluence of other conditions — heavy rains over the winter that led to an abundance of vegetation, high winds that help fires to spread, and the hollowing out of rural economies that has left fields abandoned.
Another hot spell is building, and meteorologists expect that it’s unlikely that much of Europe will experience relief until the rains of late autumn or early winter. Fire risk is spreading north and east, putting cities — including London and Paris — on alert.
Climate change has made this “fire weather” more common, and more extreme. Europe is warming faster than any other continent, meaning that blazes of the kind that tore across Gironde are likely to become a new normal, pushing the boundaries of firefighters’ ability to stop them, and threatening urban areas and critical infrastructure, with enormous consequences for businesses, societies and economies.