On holiday near wildfires - WTF to do?

[thetinsoldier]

We’re in Bordeaux, 40k from the fires. It’s really smoky, the sun is covered by smoke and it’s really quite scary. Have spoken to neighbours and they say the smoke is just being blown this way, we’re not in danger, but it’s horrible and scary.

What would you do??

The Landes Forest is man-made, not natural. Planted in the 1800s after they drained the swampy land that had lots of lakes.

Planting pines was a purely commercial decision.

Prioritising pines over deciduous woodland does little to sustain wildlife when everything burns to death.

This is the problem that people don't really get that fires are really unpredictable and change direction in an instant. It's really easy to look back with the benefit of hindsight

I lived about 40-50km from the enormous wildfire in the forests of central Sweden just over a decade ago (caused by industrial negligence) and you can plan and attempt to predict all you want but not everything is controllable

• Wind direction determines what effects individuals see - we spent 3 weeks in twilight as the wind direction put the smoke and ash over our house. Not fun in a 33C heatwave in a wooden house. People who were closer to the fire saw only blue sky.
• some results are just inexplicable - I know of a village with a row of 5 wooden houses - the middle house burned down but the others were fine.
• Originally the prognosis was that several very large lakes (around 4km across) could be used contain the fire - but the wind strengthened and the fire jumped the lakes
• firefighting is difficult in rural areas and often depends on volunteer firefighters where the nearest professional fire station can be 50 miles away so it can take time to get people in position and call in help from other towns, counties and the military.
• Where they were lucky is that the public pitched in - there is a tabloid journalist who lived in the area and recounted the fantastic response to animal rescue with people turning up with horse boxes to fetch animals, the UNESCO world heritage site under threat was rescued by locals and some contacts with private helicopters who dropped water - so while the lawn burned it didn't reach the historic buildings.
• accessibility was an issue in the thick forest. Roads melted, fire crews became cut off, parts of the fire were inaccessible - I remember the county to the north sending volunteer crews with fire engines crossing the river to the north, one at a time on a tiny rope ferry as it got them almost directly into the forest.
• The biggest error was that Sweden had decommissioned their fire fighting aircraft a few years before the fire (after a series of very wet summers where they sat in the hanger). Huge mistake! - Italy and France sent planes and the pilots were treated like national heroes and could have eaten their own weight in cakes that delivered by grateful locals. Sweden reversed the decision and several of their planes are currently in France.

The biggest takeaway is that this won't be over anytime soon as France is still in the acute phase. The Swedish fire in 2014

• 31 July - Started
• 11 August - Under control
• 11 September - Acute phase over - although damping down continued
• April 2015 - completely put out and damping down could cease - fire kept popping up again as it travelled underground in peaty subsoil and tree roots.
• after that a huge operation to rebuild roads, homes and fell damaged trees - some roads did not reopen for over 18 months