French authorities ordered the complete evacuation of the Cap Ferret peninsula on Friday, launching boats to help rescue people from the popular tourist destination as wildfires tear across western Europe.
Evacuation boats operated from three piers on the peninsula, which is situated about 70 kilometers (43 miles) west of Bordeaux in southwestern France, the province’s prefect, Sophie Brocas, said Friday morning.
Such an operation demonstrates the severity of the wildfires currently ripping across parts of southern France and elsewhere in Europe, fueled by record-breaking , climate change-driven heat waves that have turned the landscape into a tinderbox.
Similar fierce wildfires in Spain have forced the government to declare a national state of emergency.
In France’s Cap Ferret alone, 40,000 people have been evacuated, according to the country’s Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, though only a few hundred of those were evacuated by sea.
Just one road connects the Hamptons-like peninsula to the mainland, making evacuation a priority in case fires cut off access to this road. The fire grew by up to 1,000 hectares (4 square miles) every hour overnight, said Marc Vermeulen, director of Gironde’s Fire and Rescue Service, on Friday.
“Because the fire was so powerful, it also threw off spot fires right into the center of the town while it was still on the outskirts. We also had burning embers that caused the fire to spread from house to house,” Vermeulen said.
Some 53 homes and one campsite have been burnt in the blaze, which 1,000 firefighters are battling, Brocas said
Another wildfire is also burning in the area near Biscarrosse, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Cap Ferret, which has already forced 23,000 people to be evacuated.
