The daily lives of thousands of French people have been disrupted for several days due to forest fires and a mayor of a town near Bordeaux wants the situation to calm down so that his citizens can return home.
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The mayor of Cestas, Jérôme Steffe, believes that his citizens feel a lot of anxiety due to the fires “of a power that we have never seen before”, but that they also feel a lot of desire to return to their homes.
“Our town has been evacuated, i.e. 17,000 inhabitants, for three or four days now and citizens want to return home,” he explained on LCN on Tuesday. There were some who left pets, we were evacuated in the middle of the night.”
This photograph shows the closed A63 motorway near Cestas, south of Bordeaux, on July 26, 2026.
AFP
The fire had stabilized on Monday in the region, but a resumption of fires and the appearance of new fires occurred on Tuesday, due to high temperatures and lack of precipitation, according to him.
“It was announced 35 degrees and tomorrow it is announced 41 degrees. So, an exceptional heatwave episode, but above all a heatwave episode that will last. There is no rain forecast for days,” maintained the mayor.
Jérôme Steffe is particularly worried about those who do not know where their loved ones are.
“Like the center [de Bordeaux] was quickly overloaded, well, people were redispatched in towns up to 200 to 250 kilometers from where we are,” he said.
Watch the full interview in the video above.
