The smoke came first, thick and sweet with pine resin, the way it always does before the flames show themselves. I remembered it from other fires, other places. On the night of 23 July the order went out across the Cap Ferret peninsula: leave. Not tomorrow. Now.
They moved in phases at first, then in a single hard wave. Thirty-five to forty thousand souls, locals and holidaymakers alike, funneled north along the narrow D106 or onto maritime shuttles from the jetties at Grand Piquey, Le Canon, Port de la Vigne and Bélisaire. Reception centres waited in Andernos, Lanton and Biganos. The machinery worked. That is the quiet fact that matters.
The fire had begun two days earlier near Saumos. By the morning of the 24th it had swallowed more than 10,000 hectares of the Gironde sector. Between fifty and eighty houses were gone or ruined. Yet no one died. No civilian was reported injured. In the ledger of what can happen when wind hits drought and forest, those numbers feel almost indecently fortunate.
The fire is XXL and unpredictable. Winds up to 80 km/h are expected.
That was Sophie Brocas, prefect of Gironde, speaking plainly. Laurent Nuñez, the interior ministry’s top official on the ground, put the human scale into numbers without embellishment: "There are 40,000 people who have been evacuated or who are in the process of being evacuated. No deaths are to be deplored. More than 10,000 hectares have been covered. 80 houses have been burned, of which around 50 have been destroyed."
Hundreds of French firefighters, reinforced by water-bombing aircraft and crews from other EU countries, kept working the flanks. Canadairs made their runs through the heat. The wind did not slacken. The fire remained alive.
I have seen evacuations descend into panic and others conducted with the grim competence of people who have rehearsed the worst. This one belonged to the second category. Instructions were clear. Transport was offered to those without vehicles. Vulnerable residents were accounted for. The state, whatever its other failings, retained the practical capacity to empty a crowded tourist peninsula when the trees began to roar.
