At tables laid out in the shrinking shade on the desiccated grass and sand outside the sports centre in Le Porge, 200 men and a handful of women have gathered. Firefighters, soldiers, police, gendarmes, officials, first aid teams, foresters and volunteers sit elbow to elbow, plates of sausages, steak and potatoes in front of them. The village was evacuated just over 14 hours after the “megafire” – as it has become known in France – broke out 6km away last week. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
The blaze has consumed 42,000 hectares (104,000 acres) of mainly forestland west of Bordeaux. Though finally contained, there are outbreaks every day, pushing to the limit emergency services and the hundreds of amateurs who have come to their aid.
“We’ve turned a corner but we are very, very tired. We have gone beyond what we thought possible,” said a senior firefighter at Le Porge, downing a litre of water in less than a minute. “We stared into an abyss.”
Overhead, three planes carrying huge tanks of water and retardant flew low towards new fires. A drone buzzed nearby, sent up by the fire brigade to detect with thermal cameras the creeping underground blaze – described by local media as a “zombie fire” – that threatens fresh chaos in the coming days, weeks and months.
Around the village, roads run straight through a smouldering, smoking and deserted landscape of charred but upright trees. In places, the forest is intact, the tall pines in their serried green ranks. In others, chosen at apparent random by the racing flames, it has been reduced to ash and cinders as far as the eye can see.
“Now we are all running on adrenaline, but the crisis is going to pass and that’s when it will be really hard. That’s when we will weep,” said Remy Bossion, 46, whose home was damaged in the fire and who is now spending his days helping cut 200-metre-wide firebreaks through the remaining forest to slow any future outbreaks.
This weekend, fires elsewhere in France are bringing similar, if less extensive, devastation. In the Var region, George and Amal Clooney were forced to evacuate their home as a wildfire burned nearby. In the famous forests of Fontainebleau outside Paris, in Corsica and near Dijon, the flames still threaten.
Across Europe, emergency services are struggling. In the UK, 120 firefighters have been tackling a blaze in Suffolk for three days. In Spain, the cumulative number of fires in 2026 has set a new record for this time of year. In Greece, three firefighters died in Crete and thousands of tourists were evacuated from resorts.
The fire weather across the EU has broken records for this time of year, new data shows. Scientists say models of climate change have long predicted such extreme weather, though some disasters appear to be striking earlier and with more strength than expected.
“We still have a month or more of summer to go. We need rain, a lot of rain,” said the senior firefighter in Le Porge, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not have authorisation to talk to the media.
Leaders in France have been seeking to reassure worried communities – and avert a political crisis. “We are gradually getting back to normal,” said Sophie Brocas, the prefect of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region and the Gironde department, which includes Le Porge, on Thursday night. President Emmanuel Macron said last week it was not the time to analyse lessons to be learned while France was still in “full battle”.
No one doubts the scale of the megafire, which at one point reached the suburbs of Bordeaux itself, but the question of its origins and the availability of resources necessary to fight it is bitterly contested.
Among the residents of Le Porge eating at the makeshift canteen was Nicolas Di Domenico, a local public works contractor who learned of the blaze when his electricians working near the village of Saumos called to say a spark from a faulty machine being used by workers cleaning a high-tension cable had just ignited a fierce blaze.
Di Domenico, 46, said: “It was a short circuit or something of that nature and immediately everything went up because it’s all so dry. The guys there tried to use a fire extinguisher but it was too intense. My guys basically ran for their lives and by the time the fire brigade turned up it was huge.”
The blaze initially overwhelmed firefighters, who had difficulty accessing the deeper forest where it was spreading. Within six hours, it had travelled 6km (3.7 miles) to reach the outskirts of Le Porge. Very early the next morning, residents were in the streets, burning cinders were falling from a red sky and a decision was made to evacuate.
“The authorities should have stopped all work in the forest. Someone got their priorities wrong,” Di Domenico said.
Many in Le Porge and elsewhere in the region accuse the local administration of being “asleep at the wheel” before the fire, and then failing to commit sufficient resources fast enough. Many have asked why France’s ageing fleet of firefighting planes had not be replaced or sufficiently reinforced.