The air is unbreathable, the smoke saturates the sky with a thick mist which prevents the sun from breaking through.
After a week of fire, the fire of Landiras, in Gironde - commune where the disaster was declared -, the desolation froze more than 13,300 hectares.
As far as the eye can see, within this immense pine forest, the trees are charred, the ground is black and the smoke escapes from a still burning peat.
Ready to spark new flames at the slightest gust of strong wind.
This is the fear of firefighters: after days and nights of fighting, if they no longer have to face these walls of flames, they are faced with a more devious adversary, crouching in the ground and popping up here and there to create resumptions of fire.
“This is what we fear and are monitoring now
,” says Franck Quenelle, firefighter in the department.
And, at the end of the day, around 5 p.m., what he feared occurs: the fire, still imperceptible to the eye but which can be heard crackling in the heart...
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