Sitting in their suburban apartment in Mérignac on the outskirts of Bordeaux, Krishma, an interpreter, and her husband, Nassir, first felt a sense of dread when a strange black cloud turned the sky dark in the middle of the day. Then a bitter burning smell filled the air outside.
“The sky changed colour. It seemed like a cloud but it was smoke covering the sun – it wasn’t a natural phenomenon. It didn’t seem real,” said Nassir, an English literature graduate from Kabul who has been living in France for seven years. “We couldn’t breathe easily, you could feel it in your lungs.”
The acrid smell, which at first seemed like burning rubber then unmistakably like wood smoke, was blowing on the wind from the massive wildfire in Gironde in south-western France. The blaze has torn through 42,000 hectares, an area four times the size of Paris, causing one of the biggest devastations of land in France since the second world war. The government said on Monday that although the fire had stopped growing, it was still blazing and a new heatwave this week could make it harder to fight.
As authorities carried out one of the biggest evacuations in modern French history, Krishma and Nassir were among 220,000 people ordered to flee their homes in Gironde. Many people were evacuated from wooded areas directly hit by fire, where at least 240 homes were destroyed. But in an unprecedented move, tens of thousands more were ordered by police to evacuate from more built-up, urban streets as the fire reached 9 miles (15km) from the outer edge of Bordeaux’s vast suburban area.
Krishma and Nassir had to evacuate their suburban street at midnight on Friday. With their two children aged 10 and eight, they quickly packed toothbrushes, toys, one change of clothes and personal documents into their car. On Monday afternoon, they were sitting on camp beds among hundreds of people sheltering in a hangar at Bordeaux’s exhibition centre. They had slept there for three nights and did not know when they would be allowed home. The fire had not reached their residential area, but with the French government warning that the blaze was “extremely intense and unpredictable”, authorities would not yet allow a return, they said.
The couple’s main feeling was great sadness to see the Gironde forest destroyed. Krishma said: “When we were in Afghanistan there were lots of explosions, suicide attacks, but that was related to around 30 years of war. When we came here, we never thought there would be a situation like this. It brought us back to the bad memories from our past.”
Across the vast hangar, Yves, who used to work on road maintenance in Bordeaux, was sitting with his 13-year-old mastiff dog, Ichka. Yves had fled his suburban house and garden in Le Haillan outside Bordeaux with his dog’s bed under one arm and had carefully laid it out next to his camp bed. He had been ordered to evacuate in the early hours of Saturday morning.
“We had to leave because of the smoke,” he said. His wife, an administrator who did not want to be named, said she still felt shaken. “It was terrifying – you would look up at the sky and it was completely orange, even after nightfall. It was bizarre. The fire was causing that, and it really made you anxious. I feel quite a lot of anger that all this forest has burned and been lost. Seeing all that is beautiful in nature just go up in smoke is extremely painful and sad.”
Others who had fled slept in their cars. Loïc, 66, a widower who worked in the metals and glass industries before becoming a decorator, had to leave his house in Saint-Jean-d’Illac outside Bordeaux. “I had been watching this strange fog in the sky. It was a darkness almost like an eclipse,” he said. “There was a kind of ochre mist as light from the sun was diffused through falling ash. So much ash was falling that my car was turned completely grey.”
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At 1am on Saturday, Loïc was woken by banging on the door from his neighbour, a fire officer, saying he had to leave immediately. He grabbed only his wallet and car keys and ran to the car, leaving his mobile phone behind. There were so many people on the road and heading to the evacuation centre that he decided to stop elsewhere and get a bit of sleep in his car.
When he woke on Saturday, listening to the news on the car radio, he knew he could not go home and headed instead for central Bordeaux, thinking the cinema would be a safe and comfortable place. “I watched the two-part Charles de Gaulle enew the story already – then I watched The Odyssey. Then I went back to sleep in my car.”
The next day, he visited the graveyard where his wife was buried. On Monday morning, he arrived at the Bordeaux evacuation centre to get information on what to do next. He felt deeply saddened by the loss of the forest. “My generation grew up really attached to nature,” he said.
Florence, a former teaching assistant in a primary school, sat on a camp bed with her two cats in their travelling cases after having to evacuate Le Haillan outside Bordeaux. “I was distraught,” she said. “I’m asthmatic, I put tape around the windows of my apartment but I could still smell the smoke which was seeping in under my front door, so I put down wet rags. The sky was orange and grey, and there was soot everywhere.”
She said having to suddenly evacuate knowing a fire was raging in Gironde felt like something out of a war. “It felt like being in a disaster movie,” she said. “I’ve always really loved disaster movies – but now I feel like I’ve actually been in one, so I don’t ever want to watch a disaster movie again.”
