Bordeaux Mayor Thomas Cazenave says no city evacuation planned as wildfires burn nearby

Bordeaux Mayor Thomas Cazenave said authorities had no current plan to evacuate the southwest French city as forest fires burned nearby, but warned that officials were prepared for conditions to change.

Cazenave said on Sunday that the fire remained on the edge of the Bordeaux metropolitan area and was not advancing from the west. He said there were no plans to evacuate the city’s approximately 270,000 residents.

The flames were estimated to be 25 to 30 kilometres from central Bordeaux and about 15 kilometres from the metropolitan area near Martignas-sur-Jalle. The town, which has about 8,000 residents and lies on the western edge of the metropolitan area, had been evacuated.

Firefighters were attempting to prevent the fires from moving closer to Bordeaux and its surrounding wine-growing region. Thousands of residents had been evacuated from villages near the city.

Guillaume Millet of the Gironde fire and rescue service said the fire’s unpredictability was making the response more difficult. He said it had no clear direction and its movement could not be reliably predicted.

Some residents of Le Barp, about 30 kilometres south of Bordeaux, refused to leave, while others said they did not know where to go.

Sébastien Piquet, a 50-year-old former soldier, said his wife and son had evacuated but that he was remaining behind to help his brother-in-law move 60 dogs from a kennel if necessary.

The fire was believed to have started accidentally in Saumos on Wednesday. It had burned approximately 42,000 hectares and led to the evacuation of around 220,000 people, in what the source described as one of the largest evacuation operations in French history.