A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
In Spain and France, hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing wildfires. In France, the fire has burned through an area four times the size of Paris. Sebastian Braddock is a reporter with the Paris-based AFP news agency. He's covering the fires from Lege-Cap-Ferret on the southwestern coast, where they have lost internet access. Sebastian, what's happening where you are?
SEBASTIAN BRADDOCK: So I'm in a firefighting convoy heading south of Lege-Cap-Ferret on a peninsula which is the focus of much of the early firefighting efforts. And here, what we've got are firefighters - and accompanied by volunteers - attempting to put the brakes on this fire as quickly as possible before temperatures reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit either this afternoon or tomorrow as a heat wave sweeps across much of the region affected by this fire - the worst France has seen since 1949.
MARTÍNEZ: You mentioned that more heat is on the way. What kinds of preparations are being done to try and just be ready for this?
BRADDOCK: Well, it's not just heat. It's also wind. Wind is turning easterly, and that means you've got dry winds from further inland. They're whipping up the flames like bellows. And that means that what I've been seeing is - I was there as firefighters and volunteers were digging through a firefight - like, a firebreak across the forest, widening it to 50 meters by 25 kilometers long over the past few days as they attempted to provide these corridors to prevent the fire from leaping from one part of the forest to the next. And then, obviously, they're trying to put out as many fires and little blazes still smoldering as they can. But the concern is that with the heat and wind coming, it just takes the slightest bit of encouragement for everything to go up in flames again.
MARTÍNEZ: I know more than 220,000 people have been evacuated in southwestern France alone, one of the largest evacuation efforts in Europe since World War II. So how has that been playing out?
BRADDOCK: I think it's kind of been patchy in places. I think, by and large, we have to credit everyone who's managed to make this a success. I think there have obviously been pockets of chaos. I mean, from Le Cap-Ferret, we've got those images, those famous images of people being evacuated by boat. And then it also depends. Like, a lot of these rural municipalities that are affected are kind of cut off. I was speaking to Cecile Boudeau (ph) yesterday from Le Porge, a town in which 12% of the buildings have been incinerated. Her parents, aged 76 and 80, had to flee the town in the early hours when it swept over last week along untracked roads. And you can imagine the stress that caused them at their age.
MARTÍNEZ: Are these people that have been evacuated - do they have a place to stay, or is something being done to help find them a place?
BRADDOCK: There's a big hangar within Bordeaux itself which is housing thousands of evacuees, both residents and tourists who've been caught up on their holiday to the southwest of France in the blaze. I'd also say that obviously, some people can count on relatives. Some people can't. And ultimately, it's just a question of housing them and seeing where they go next.
MARTÍNEZ: How are people reacting to the way the government is responding to the fires?
BRADDOCK: So in Le Porge, as I said, where - which has been widely devastated, there's a sense of real anger towards the authorities. The prefect was booed as she came to give a press conference that I was at yesterday. And they've - in that town in particular, there's a lot of trauma. There's a lot of distrust of outsiders, compounded by a spate of burglaries across the region. The mayor of Le Porge, Martial Zaninetti, has appealed for people to not jump to conclusions about how the fires were handled. And he urges people to wait until the outcome of the investigation comes.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. That's AFP reporter Sebastian Braddock. Sebastian, thank you very much.
BRADDOCK: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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