This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
LE PORGE, France — A monster fire-induced thundercloud towered over Bordeaux this summer, the first time firefighters had ever seen this type of ominous smoke-and-lightning weather system in France.
The wildfire that produced it drove more than 200,000 people to evacuate in July and tore through 162 square miles of dense pine forest on the Atlantic coast.
It burned down 183 homes here in Le Porge, a tiny town in the middle of the forest where loggers live alongside neighbors who commute to Bordeaux.
One of the houses belonged to Jean-Charles Diné, who works on jet robotics near the Bordeaux Airport.
“Nothing left at all — everything burned,” he said outside the village church. Diné, 60, was already making plans to rebuild.
“There’s nothing unreasonable about building like this in the woods,” said Diné. “Not everyone wants to live in the city, so it’s completely fine to live in the forest.”
Not so fine any more, experts say, at least not without radical changes in the way France runs its forests and lets its suburbs expand deep into rural terrain.
1. Joelle Kerrier, 75, surveys her property that burned in Le Porge. 2. A hunting lodge stands beside pine forest burned by a wildfire that started July 22 and blackened about 104,000 acres in and around Le Porge. 3. The interior of D&P Green, a pine resin distillery destroyed by the wildfire in Le Porge.
Wildfires this summer in France, Greece and Spain, several of them deadly, have led to a painful reckoning as Europeans ponder a question all too familiar to Californians: Have they endangered their cities and suburbs by building too far into the wildlands?
Over the last decade, hundreds of homes have burned down near the outer limits of Lisbon, Milan and other European cities, including scores this summer outside Madrid and Athens.
In the Bordeaux region, where aerospace and technology jobs, splendid beaches and moderate housing prices have been attracting 20,000 new residents each year, suburban sprawl has pierced well into the pine forest, testing the limits of building in fire zones.
For France, long accustomed to wildfires along arid stretches of the Atlantic and Mediterranean, the devastation in Le Porge has yielded rare consensus that its fire safety system is not up to fighting mega-fires brought on by climate change.
What to do about it is well understood. But at what cost to whom?
