(Marseille) The night was “calm” on the front of the biggest fire of the year to date in France which broke out Tuesday afternoon in a forest in the Var and the inhabitants of four evacuated hamlets were able to return home them, announced the firefighters.
“Quiet night on the fire. The reinforcements have all arrived and the number of personnel on the fire is 600 and 190 machines,” the Var firefighters said in a press release. The water bomber planes that had stopped their rotations at nightfall should resume their action around 7 a.m.
Firefighters on the ground continue to treat the edges of the fire, which has burned 600 hectares of forest, to contain it and prevent it from spreading.
The fire, fanned by a strong wind, broke out on Tuesday around 3 p.m. in the town of Vidauban, at departmental road 48, in the hinterland of Saint-Tropez, an area often hit by fires summer.
By late Tuesday evening, the situation was “much more favourable”, Colonel Frédéric Gosse, deputy of the Var Departmental Fire and Rescue Service (Sdis), told AFPTV. “There the wind has dropped, temperatures are dropping, the humidity is rising”, he explained, stressing that “it is not common for a 600-hectare fire so early in the season”.
The origin of the fire is still undetermined, an investigation is in the hands of the gendarmes.
Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, a fire burned 500 hectares this year and led to the evacuation of nearly 200 people in eastern Spain in mid-April, fueled by unseasonably high temperatures.
By 2023, half a million hectares had burned in the European Union, according to a report from the European Commission.
