France's biggest wildfire this summer has been brought under control, authorities said on Thursday, August 7, after it killed one person and destroyed thousands of hectares of land and dozens of homes in the South.
Around 2,000 firefighters were mobilized in France's southern Aude department to contain the blaze that started on Tuesday. 13 people have been injured, two of them seriously.
But authorities said the most severe fire in France's Mediterranean region in at least 50 years has been contained. "The fire is under control," said Lucie Roesch, secretary general of the Aude prefecture.
The announcement came after regional authorities in Spain said late Wednesday that a wildfire near the Mediterranean tourist town of Tarifa, which had prompted evacuations, had been stabilized. Firefighters on the scene in the Aude department called it a "classic job but on an extraordinary scale," saying the day was spent dealing with the remaining active pockets of fire.
"The objective is to stabilize the fire" and halt its progress by the end of the day, said Christophe Magny, chief of the Aude department's firefighter unit.
The fire advanced much more slowly overnight to Thursday than at the start, when it engulfed around 1,000 hectares per hour, according to the authorities in the nearby city of Narbonne. Weather conditions had become more favorable after two days of strong and changing winds that made the blaze's progress difficult to predict. However, the fire will not be "declared extinguished for several days," said Christian Pouget, prefect of the Aude department. "There is still a lot of work to be done."
A 65-year-old woman, who had refused to evacuate, was found dead in her scorched house, while 13 people were injured, 11 of them firefighters.
The wildfire is a "catastrophe on an unprecedented scale," Prime Minister Francois Bayrou said Wednesday during a visit to the affected region. "What is happening today is linked to global warming and linked to drought," Bayrou said.
The blaze has burned around 17,000 hectares of land. The fire is France's biggest so far in a summer that has already seen around 9,000 fires, mainly along the Mediterranean coast, according to the emergency management service. An investigation has been opened into the cause, local officials said, but there were no firm leads so far.
The Aude department in particular has seen an increase in areas burned in recent years, aggravated by low rainfall and the uprooting of vineyards, which used to help slow down the advance of fires.