Evacuations in Marseille, 2,000 hectares burned in Aude, eight fires in Hérault... Southeastern France hit by fires

The violent fires that have been raging in the south of France since last week's heatwave reached a peak on Tuesday, July 8. Marseille, Aude, and Hérault were particularly hard hit by the flames, leading to evacuations and road closures in some places.

The flames, carried by the mistral, reached Marseille , while thousands of hectares went up in smoke in Hérault, Aude and Gard.

A fire started by a car fire on the A55 motorway, which started late in the morning in Pennes-Mirabeau , a town bordering Marseille, spread rapidly, driven by a northerly wind, causing "fire jumps of up to 300 metres", according to the fire brigade.

In just a few hours, it covered 700 hectares of land toward France's second-largest city, forcing the closure of Aix-Marseille Provence Airport, the fourth-largest in France by passenger numbers, by midday. A partial resumption of traffic was expected from 9:30 p.m.

The plume of smoke released in Marseille caused a concentration of fine particles ten times higher than the norm, according to Atmo-Sud, and extended out to sea for around a hundred kilometers, according to satellite images.

Nine firefighters were slightly poisoned and "a dozen homes were affected," according to regional prefect Georges-François Leclerc, who described the situation as "not frozen, but under control" at around 5:30 p.m.

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau arrived on the scene. "Support for our firefighters and forces fighting the fires," President Emmanuel Macron responded on X.

The windy weather conditions were expected to last "a good part of the night (...), but we no longer have a linear progression," explained Vice Admiral Lionel Mathieu, head of the Marseille fire brigade, late in the afternoon. More than 700 firefighters were still engaged at the end of Tuesday.

Some precautionary evacuations - at least 400 people in Marseille according to the city's mayor, Benoît Payan - took place, and the FR.alert system sent text messages recommending confinement to all phones in the affected areas.

Arriving at 4 p.m. at the gates of the northern districts of the Phocaean city, the fire prompted the prefecture and the authorities to call for confinement of the approximately 15,000 inhabitants of the 16th arrondissement, a mixture of traditional village dwellings and large housing estates, such as that of La Castellane.

Police have cordoned off the area just below the Grand Littoral shopping center. "They won't let us in," said a resident trapped with her shopping cart.

In the Estaque district, on the northern edge of the city, Monique Peter, a 73-year-old retiree, has "already had big fires like this in 2001, 2005, and 2006, but not this quickly. In the space of ten minutes, the fire came out of Pennes-Mirabeau, it really jumped. When we were outside, we saw birds flying away in flames."

"We were forced to leave because the flames were reaching the garden, and the firefighters arrived four hours later, quite simply. And since then, we've been here and we can't tell if our house is still standing," she laments.

Late in the afternoon, trains passing near the fire, particularly the line to Paris, were interrupted from and to Marseille for an indefinite period.

The North Hospital, one of the city's largest public institutions, "has switched to generators as a safety measure due to power outages," the Marseille Public Hospitals Authority said.

At the other end of the Mediterranean coast, near Narbonne in the Aude department , more than a thousand firefighters from across France continued to battle a fire that had swept through 2,000 hectares of forest since Monday. The department has been hit by three forest fires in one week . According to the prefect, the fire was still spreading moderately at the end of Tuesday.

Here too, the fire, which started on Monday under unknown circumstances at a Corbières wine estate, quickly spread through dried vegetation and under the influence of winds blowing up to 90 km/h. An investigation has been opened by the Narbonne prosecutor's office to determine the causes of the fire.

To avoid the uncontrolled parking of large numbers of trucks and to ease traffic flow during this holiday period, the A9 motorway, which had been closed since Monday afternoon, causing dozens of kilometers of traffic jams, was reopened to traffic at the end of the morning.

But the A9 motorway was closed again at the end of the afternoon, for more than three hours, "as a precaution", this time in Hérault, in both directions of traffic, between Sète (exit N.33) and Agde (N.34), due to smoke from a pine forest fire which burned 400 hectares in the communes of Castelnau-de-Guers and Montagnac.

Emergency services deployed in Hérault announced this Tuesday evening that the A9 motorway will be reopened. A total of 820 firefighters were battling the flames in this department on Tuesday evening, on three fronts.

On BFMTV, Hérault Prefect François-Xavier Lauch described a "very complicated day" in his department, recording "eight fires since the beginning of the afternoon." Seven of these eight fires were "well contained," according to the prefect. The prefect is pleased that there are "no casualties or damage to homes."

About fifty kilometers to the north, Gard firefighters had been responding to a forest fire in Montardier since 1:55 p.m., where 120 hectares of vegetation, brush, and hardwood trees had burned. In Haute-Corse, a fire broke out this Tuesday afternoon in Solaro, burning through six hectares. The blaze spread quickly before being brought under control.