A fire broke out on Thursday in the commercial area south of Arles, local media report.
More than 120 firefighters are engaged on this field and vegetation fire.
[🔴#Operation]
More than 120 #Pompiers13 are engaged on @VilledArles to fight against a 🔥 in a peri-urban environment.
🚁 Pompiers13 and 1 #DASH from @SecCivileFrance are on site.
⚠️ Watch out for the slowdown on #N113 pic.twitter.com/b6ki1AIHmQ
– Firefighters 13 (@Firefighters_13) July 7, 2022
Due to the mistral, the flames spread very quickly: the wind was blowing in the afternoon at 63 km/h.
The N113 has been cut off from traffic, indicates La Provence.
All access to the expressway has been suspended around Arles.
For security reasons, electricity was cut off in the surrounding neighborhoods.
In the area, four Canadair and up to 185 firefighters engaged in a kind of "urban guerrilla warfare" to "do everything" to prevent the fire from reaching nearby homes or businesses.
At least eight houses were damaged but several hundred were able to be preserved, according to firefighters contacted by AFP, who wanted to be reassuring around 5 p.m., believing that the situation was changing favorably.
The town hall of Arles indicated that a DIY store was affected by the fire and had to be evacuated, in this city which hosts from July 4 to September 25 "Les Rencontres d'Arles", a photography festival, which had won 12,000 visitors in 2021.
“A multiplicity of fire starts”
Hundreds of firefighters fought this Thursday afternoon “a multiplicity of fire starts” in the Gard and the Bouches-du-Rhône, in “extreme” conditions, facing a strong mistral and soils victims of an early drought .
At the end of the afternoon, the Bouches-du-Rhône firefighters also faced two other fire starts, one in Martigues;
the other at Puy-Sainte-Réparade, above Aix-en-Provence.
In total more than 160 firefighters were mobilized.
The gusts reached up to 85 km / h this Thursday in the Bouches-du-Rhône, where the prefecture had prohibited access to the 25 massifs of the department, from the National Park of the creeks to the Alpilles very close to Arles .
On the other side of the Rhône, on the Gard side, some 120 firefighters were mobilized in the town of Générac for a fire.
During this intervention, a firefighter was slightly injured and evacuated to a hospital.
Read alsoFires and forest fires: “We are facing an explosive weather cocktail”
The south of France has to deal with an extreme and early drought with many areas on heightened alert or even in crisis, such as in the Bouches-du-Rhône or the Alpes-Maritimes, measures accompanied by numerous restrictions.
As of Wednesday, the firefighters had asked for responsible behavior in the face of a risk of forest fires "at the highest" for this Thursday.
They had then warned that the wind should not weaken on Friday.