Fire Clouds and No Rain: Europe's Wildfire Season Turns Explosive
A wet winter followed by drought and record heat has left France and Spain fighting blazes that won't sit still
By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
Roughly 15km outside Bordeaux, a wall of flame has forced French President Emmanuel Macron to call a crisis meeting, even as the city's mayor insists there is no plan yet to evacuate. That's the gap between official calm and what is burning on the ground across southern Europe this week.
According to the Guardian's weather tracker, an unusual sequence set the stage: a wet winter that grew heavy vegetation, followed by a dry spring and repeated record-breaking summer heatwaves. About 90% of wildfires start from human activity, typically catching in "fine fuels" — grass, pine needles, dry litter — that normally take hours of heat to dry out. This year, drought turned that vegetation to tinder well ahead of schedule.
In Spain's eastern Castellon province, fires have burned more than 4,300 hectares and forced roughly 15,000 residents to evacuate, Al Jazeera reports. Firefighters there are still working to contain the blazes. Near Bordeaux, French crews are similarly straining to hold a line as a heatwave looms, according to the BBC and Al Jazeera.
Scientists cited by the Guardian point to a related phenomenon worsening the danger: pyrocumulonimbus clouds, sometimes called "fire clouds," which form when intense heat from a blaze punches into the atmosphere and can spawn their own erratic winds and lightning — making some fires harder to predict and even harder to fight.
No fatalities have been confirmed in the reporting reviewed here. What is confirmed is scale: tens of thousands of hectares scorched, thousands displaced, and a French president treating the fire near his country's wine capital as a crisis matter, not a routine one.
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— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian, the BBC and Al Jazeera.
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