The fire in the Gros Bessillon area of France's Var department, in Provence, reignited and burned roughly 1,250 additional hectares between Friday and Saturday, bringing its total to 4,500 hectares by week's end [1]. Overnight work by firefighters kept the flames from reaching the villages of Correns and Montfort-sur-Argens directly [1]. Some 1,300 firefighters are deployed, and 2,500 people remain unable to return to their homes [1].
The numbers describe a fire that came back. More than a quarter of the fire's total footprint has burned since Friday's reignition, roughly 1,250 hectares of the 4,500 [1]. The villages it approached were defended through the night rather than spared by the weather, and the displacement count has not moved: 2,500 people were out of their homes before the weekend and remain out of them now [1].
The Var fire is separate from the fire near Bordeaux, France's largest wildfire in 70 years, which has burned 420 square kilometres [1]. As of Saturday, that fire was contained within its perimeter but not fully controlled [1]. France is holding two lines at once: one around the record fire in the southwest, and one around a fire in Provence that had subsided and returned.
Two things are not in the verified record. No injury count appears in the reporting we fetched; that is an absence of information, not a confirmed zero. No update newer than Saturday was available at publication, so every figure above is a Saturday figure [1].
The conditions behind both fires are the ones sitting over much of the continent. The same heatwave and drought have pushed the Danube to record lows, far enough that Hungary is winding down the Paks nuclear plant, which cools itself with river water [2]. A summer dry enough to idle a nuclear plant is dry enough to relight a fire line, and the distinction between contained, controlled and out is, for the 2,500 people of the Var still waiting, the only forecast that matters.
For those 2,500, the week's arithmetic is plain: the fire added roughly 1,250 hectares after it reignited, and the reporting that would say when they can go home does not yet exist [1].
