MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Authorities in France and Spain say wildfires that have been raging for nearly a week are mostly contained.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
But another heat wave is underway, which will bring high temperatures and strong winds, so there are fears that could cause the fires to grow out of control again and cause new ones to ignite.
MARTIN: We're going to go now to NPR's Eleanor Beardsley in France. Eleanor, good morning.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: What is the damage so far where you are?
BEARDSLEY: Well, the two biggest fires started last week - so they've been burning for a while - in the southwest region of France, near the city of Bordeaux. They burned through about a hundred thousand acres, including forests, farmland and villages. The military's been mobilized, joining firefighters. About 5,000 people are now battling these blazes. The European Union has sent firefighting planes and helicopters to join the French Canadair planes. So those are the planes that scoop up water and dump it on fires. And in France, more than 200,000 people - residents and vacationers - have been evacuated. About a hundred thousand in Spain.
MARTIN: Could you tell us a little bit more about what this area is like? Like, what are the conditions there?
BEARDSLEY: Yeah. It's a wine-growing region around Bordeaux. It's on the coast with wide Atlantic beaches, good for surfing. But there are also vast pine forests. The forest of Les Landes is the largest man-made woodland in Western Europe. They began planting pine trees there in the 1700s to absorb the swampy soil. So the fuel is there, Michel. Then there's the weather. It's one of the main causes for these fires. Heat waves have parched the country.
I spoke with Mounia Mostefaoui. She's a climatologist and board member of the French scientific expert group on climate change. She said all this was predicted. Of course, not the exact timing of the fires, but the conditions. She said at the rate Europe is warming - faster than any other continent - models show that heat-wave days will be multiplied by five, which is exactly what is happening. Here she is.
MOUNIA MOSTEFAOUI: These heat waves - they create drought conditions. It's exactly what we had currently in France. Like, we had three heat waves and we're only in July. You know, August has not even started.
BEARDSLEY: And so now, Michel, we're going into the fourth heat wave, and this is the perfect cocktail for these wildfires.
MARTIN: Eleanor, we've been hearing from French firefighters about the unpredictable nature of these fires. Why are they so hard to put out?
BEARDSLEY: Yeah. Firefighters say that these are aggressive, erratic - they're calling them monster zombie fires that change course, reignite themselves. They say they're helpless because all the firefighting rules in the book get thrown out, you know?
But what we're seeing is a phenomenon we've never seen in France before, though we've seen it in California. It's what are called fire storms or fire clouds, pyrocumulus clouds. And I spoke to Jean-Baptiste Filippi, who is a scientist with the French national research center. His specialty is fire weather forecasting. He said fire clouds form when an intense fire and a storm interact. He said there's an exchange of heat and energy in what he called a destructive feedback loop. Here he is.
JEAN-BAPTISTE FILIPPI: Anytime you have a cloud that is forming, you have energy in the atmosphere. But the fact that the fire is there is making this energy available for the fire, so the interaction becomes strong.
BEARDSLEY: You know, he says a column of gases, heat and vertical winds forms and it can reach six miles high. And you cannot put out such fires, just like you can't stop a storm. And he says this happened over the weekend with the Bordeaux fires. And there's no time to react in such a fire, so, you know, that's why they have already evacuated 200,000 people preemptively, you know, before it would become too late.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Eleanor Beardsley. Eleanor, thank you.
BEARDSLEY: You're welcome, Michel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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