Since Friday, brothers Florian and Damien Oriol and their cousin Thibault have converted the pizzeria they manage in Léognan, about twenty kilometers from Bordeaux, into a pizza supply point for firefighters battling the gigantic fire that broke out on Wednesday in the Gironde department. 42,000 hectares have burned there alone. On Sundays, the place is closed, but firefighters don’t rest, so neither do they, and they open specifically to fulfill the daily order.
“We want to help as much as possible. Seeing how serious the situation is, for us right now this is the most important thing,” explains Damien, 26, who is in charge of baking. They work in an assembly line: one kneads, another places ingredients, the other puts it in the oven. In less than an hour, 16 units have come out. They have delivered fifty solidarity pizzas in the last three days.
Léognan, a municipality of 10,600 inhabitants, is known for having one of Bordeaux’s main appellations of origin. It is surrounded by forest and vineyards. It is also about twenty kilometers from the fire. For a few days now, rumors have been circulating that they will be the next to be evacuated, as they are only 10 minutes from Cestas, where the population had to leave in the early hours of Saturday to Sunday due to the proximity of the flames.
“We depend on the wind. We know that the fires are very close to us and to nearby towns that have already been evacuated, so we are watching it minute by minute depending on the wind direction,” says Thierry Othon, who works at Léognan Town Hall and has been ordered to take charge of the operation, should it occur. “At any moment they can tell us we have to leave,” he adds.
In the Gironde department, more than 220,000 people have been evacuated, out of a total of 250,000 evacuated, and more than a dozen towns on the outskirts of Bordeaux have already been emptied of population. Others nearby live with the uncertainty of having to leave at any moment, either because the flames are approaching or due to the toxicity of the smoke plumes. However, the fire has stabilized tonight in the region and for the first time there have been no more nocturnal evacuations.
Cestas, 20 kilometers from Bordeaux, was evacuated in the early hours of Saturday and the flames reached the forest on Sunday afternoon. Not a soul remained in the municipality, except for the fire station personnel. “The pizzas are here!” shouts one. They are the ones that the young Oriols had prepared, a few kilometers away. “You have to eat them before leaving or else we’ll have to throw them away,” he shouts to his colleagues.
Adrien R. is the head of another fire unit from Lille, in the north of the country, and says they arrived in the early hours of Saturday and went directly to the Gironde fire. “Where? I don’t even know anymore… As soon as we arrived, we went straight there,” he recounts, without wanting to provide more details.
The biggest in half a century
In recent days, personnel from other areas of the country have been diverted to try to quell the largest fire the country has experienced in 50 years. Ground resources have been reinforced, with almost a thousand firefighters, 1,700 gendarmes, and a thousand military personnel in the Gironde department alone. President Emmanuel Macron will chair an interministerial crisis cell in Paris on Monday to assess the situation.
Ministers from the economic area will also meet, as activity in the evacuated zone, where there are several defense and aeronautical company facilities, will be paralyzed.
The Minister of the Interior, Laurent Nuñez, reported on a situation he described as unprecedented, as 115,000 hectares have burned so far this year across the country, a record figure. That’s 20,000 more than the day before.
The virulence of the fire and its proximity to Bordeaux are a concern. The Government is working on all possible scenarios, including the evacuation of this city, although for the moment “that point has not been reached,” said Nuñez. The mayor of Bordeaux, Thomas Cazenave, also president of the metropolitan region, insisted that this is not on the agenda.
“We are considering all scenarios, but I insist again that the evacuation of Bordeaux is not being considered and it is not good to scare the population if this is not on the table,” he said. The fire is approaching the limit of the metropolitan area, but it is not advancing on the western flank,” he noted. The flames, no longer just the smoke plumes, are at a distance of between 20 and 30 kilometers from the city.
The fire has left deserted areas that would now be full of tourists, such as the Cap Ferret peninsula, evacuated on Thursday. At the press conference to report on the situation, the prefect of Gironde, Sophie Brocas, warned that none of the evacuees would be able to return home until the fire was controlled, nor “those municipalities that have already seen it pass.”
She also asked tourists not to go to the area, as temperatures are expected to rise in the coming days, which “is obviously not favorable.” She insisted that this fire is an “unprecedented, unpredictable, and unknown” phenomenon, which they had never had to face. “A firestorm that feeds day and night, creating its own wind currents,” explained the head of firefighters of Gironde, Marc Vermeulen.
In Léognan, Daniel Turquay, a well-known landowner in the area, has 40 hectares of pine forests, which surround some of the castles in this wine-growing region. He also has dozens of hectares in the Landes department, further south, where the other second most important fire has forced 30,000 people to evacuate.
Some began to return to their homes on Sunday. “I’m not afraid of them burning. What I feel is anger, because every year that passes we lament but we haven’t learned our lesson, and it’s an entire generation of our nature that is burning and being lost. I have lived here all my life and this is the worst fire I have ever seen,” he says.
It’s midday and smoke plumes cover the sky while the Oriols, the solidarity pizza makers of Léognan, keep watching which way the wind is blowing. They are worried because, if they have to be evacuated, they won’t be able to make the pizza order for the Gironde firefighters.
