The Saumos megafire in Gironde is finally extinguished after two months of combat

The battle against the Saumos megafire has finally been won but the results are no less terrible. This summer's fire in Gironde was declared "extinguished" on Monday by the authorities, two months after the start of this fire, the largest in area in France since 1949, the prefecture announced.

“The Saumos forest fire which covered 42,000 hectares this summer, including 37,296 hectares destroyed, is now extinguished,” state services wrote in a press release. In Porge, a town of 3,500 inhabitants, more than 180 homes out of a total of 250 had been destroyed.

A storm of fire

Occurring on July 22 in Saumos, in the vast forest massif of the Landes de Gascogne, the fire quickly threatened the very touristy Cap-Ferret peninsula and then the outskirts of the metropolis of Bordeaux, with the formation of a “pyrocumulonimbus”, a fire storm. Some 224,000 people had to be evacuated before the fire stopped progressing and was declared “fixed” on August 1, nevertheless continuing to smolder for several weeks in the form of smokehouses.

“After several weeks of mobilization and surveillance, the firefighters and all the actors involved in the fight against the fire made it possible to bring the fire under lasting control,” underlined the prefecture, recalling that the disaster caused “no human casualties”.

More than 3,000 firefighters mobilized

In total, 3,300 firefighters from all over France combined their efforts with soldiers, police officers and gendarmes, foresters, farmers and volunteers, for the “largest firefighting operation” in the modern history of Civil Security, the prefect of Gironde, Sophie Brocas, highlighted at the beginning of August.

Forestry work in the devastated area was only able to resume on September 8, with intense work of felling and evacuation of burned wood to be carried out in the coming weeks to secure the massif against falling trees and the possible irruption of parasites.

Our articles on Fires in France

Around 98,000 hectares have been burned since this summer by the 21,000 fire outbreaks experienced in mainland France, a level five times higher than the average of the last 20 years and a record since 1976, according to a provisional report from the National Forestry Office.