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Flights were grounded at France’s Bordeaux–Mérignac Airport after an enormous fire nearby killed two firefighters.
The hearth erupted from a grassy, wooded area on Avenue Roland Garros, near the airport’s automobile park, at around 2.30pm on Tuesday.
Huge plumes of smoke spread across the sky as one hectare of land went up in flames.
Two firefighters died inside ‘minutes’ of attempting to place out the blaze, Marc Vermeulen, director of the Gironde departmental fire and rescue service (SDIS), told French news outlet Le Monde.
They were aboard a tanker truck once they were ‘confronted with a really violent’ fire that ‘trapped’ them in a ‘very dense’ pine forest.
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The flames were as high as 30 metres, Vermeulen added.
‘Accompanied by swirling winds, the situation was very unfavourable,’ he said.
French president Emmanuel Macron wrote X: ‘I offer my condolences, gratitude and support of the nation to their families, family members and the firefighters of France.’
‘It’s burning like crazy’
Video posted to social media showed passengers disembarking from an easyJet flight as a column of thick grey smoke loomed behind them.
A passenger filmed the inferno from a bus passing by as helicopters darted out and in of the smoke.
‘It’s burning like crazy in Merignac,’ the passenger said.
Several flights scheduled to reach at Bordeaux-Mérignac airport have been delayed while others were stopped from taking off.
The airport’s marketing and communication manager, Sophie Vergnères, told AFP: ‘It was indeed impressive.
‘From a distance, it was quite impressive.’
Some 100 firefighters, backed by specialist aircraft, are reported to be still fighting the blaze.
The reason behind the fireplace, which is not any longer spreading, is unclear, based on the Association for the Prevention and Reporting of Forest Fires.
Gironde is one among a raft of French departments, akin to counties, which have been ravaged by wildfires in recent days.
The second-highest alert for forest fires, red, is in effect in Gironde amid a spell of hot, dry weather.
People cannot start campfires or use electric engines in forests under the warning, with just about all recreational activities banned from 2pm to 10pm.
A wildfire swept through towns on France’s Mediterranean coast near Frejus on Sunday, threatening homes and forcing the evacuation of several hamlets as strong winds and drought conditions fueled its rapid spread, local authorities said.
‘The hearth spread extremely quickly within the context of this heatwave and extreme drought,’ local prefect Simon Babre told BFM TV.
The blaze had scorched about 180 hectares by Sunday evening, adding to the some 42,000 hectares already destroyed by flames by mid-July.
Experts told Metro that the record temperatures that baked Western Europe for over every week in late June would worsen the danger of wildfires, given the outlook for sustained high temperatures, very low humidity and dry vegetation.
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