U.S. mom and kids stranded as French wildfire traps holiday town: 'It felt like being in a film'
Along France’s southern Atlantic coast, more than 2,500 firefighters are battling what officials are calling the country’s most severe wildfire of the year. In less than a week, the flames have scorched an area four times the size of Paris, generating their own wind and firestorms — a phenomenon rarely seen outside the American West.
The blaze has come within roughly 9 miles of Bordeaux’s wine-growing suburbs over the weekend, according to the city’s mayor, Thomas Cazenave, and now sits 15 to 19 miles from the city center. At least 84 firefighters have been injured, more than 200 homes destroyed, and more than 220,000 people forced to evacuate—more than five times the number displaced during the last major wildfire in the same region four years ago.
About 25 miles south, a separate fire sparked by a burning van on a country road forced another 30,000 residents from the town of Biscarrosse, including residents of a nursing home and a children’s summer camp.
Rebecca Papin, a mother from Franklin, Tennessee, had been vacationing with her children—Violet, 9, and Louie, 11—in another coastal town when the evacuation order came Thursday night. But she never heard the alert.
“On Thursday night, when I put the children down around 11 o’clock, it was such an unstable situation that I thought the next day anything could happen, and that I must get at least a couple of hours of sleep,” Papin told CBS News. “I’m a very light sleeper. So I always sleep with earplugs in. Because of that, I missed the evacuation when they went throughout the city.”
By the time she opened her shutters Friday morning, the street was eerily silent. Her neighbor’s cars were gone. Within two minutes, a police officer was at her door: “You’re not allowed to leave at this point.”
“I looked around on the street and every car from every driveway was gone. I had the only, the only car,” she said.
Soldiers patrolled the town. The supermarket opened for a few hours Sunday, but only Papin and the troops in camouflage were inside. “I felt strange seeing the soldiers in the grocery store. It felt like being in a film,” she said.
The crisis extends well beyond France. In Spain, the government has declared a national emergency as crews fight fires on two fronts—one west of Madrid, the largest in the country’s recent history, and another near Valencia, where a 78-year-old man died. European scientists attribute the severity to a combination of heat and drought, following Western Europe’s hottest June on record. France alone has already burned an area nearly the size of Los Angeles this year.
Papin is still trapped. Her street is barricaded with metal barriers at both ends. She has considered moving the barrier herself and driving toward the police blockade, pleading that she fears for her life. But there is only one road out of town—through the Landes de Gascogne, one of France’s largest forests—and it is already engulfed in flames.
Conditions could worsen this week as a fourth heat wave is forecast to hit France and much of Western Europe, from Italy to the U.K., around midweek, with temperatures pushing 104°F. Some weather models suggest the heat could persist through the first week of August, further escalating fire risk.
“I’m taking it day by day,” Papin said. “But if I have to, I will move that barrier myself.”