Fontainebleau

The Fontainebleau forest, a onetime royal hunting preserve 60 kilometres southeast of Paris, is burning. 800 hectares have gone up. The fire is still spreading.

This is not normal. Fontainebleau is not the south of France. It is not Corsica. It is not the scrubland that fire crews expect to battle every summer. It is a damp, ancient forest on the outskirts of Paris, and on Sunday, France sent firefighting planes from the south of the country to fight a fire in the Paris region. [1] That has never happened before.

Eric Brocardi, of France's national federation of firemen, said it plainly: it was the first time fire bomber planes had been sent up from the normally drier and hotter south to extinguish fires in the Paris region. [2]

France is in its third heatwave since May. The previous two broke temperature records across Europe and caused thousands of excess deaths in Belgium, Britain, France, and Spain. The June heatwaves would have been "virtually impossible" without climate change, according to the World Weather Attribution group of scientists. [3]

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said forest fires have already consumed 17,000 hectares in France this year. Once the figures are fully tallied, that will come to 25,000 hectares, "twice as much as the same period" in 2025. [4]

The fire disrupted the A6 highway, France's main north-south artery, on one of the busiest travel weekends of the summer. The high-speed rail line to the south had delays of up to six hours. At Gare de Lyon in Paris, a 34-year-old physiotherapist took the delay in stride. "It's global warming," she said. "It's the disruption of the seasons... there are political decisions to be taken." [5]

Around 400 firefighters worked to contain the flames. Fifteen homes were evacuated in the village of Vaudoue. Residents sat outside near the war memorial, unsure where they would sleep. One evacuee described seeing ash falling, putting cats and dogs in the car, and seeing fire on both sides of the road. [6]

The heatwave has also forced the shutdown of three of France's nuclear power stations. The Tour de France shortened Sunday's stage by 30 kilometres as temperatures approached 40 degrees Celsius.

On Friday I wrote about the Consdorf fire here in Luxembourg, a pine forest destroyed in the Mullerthal. On Saturday, ten fires burned across the country overnight. The yellow heat alert is now on its fifth day. The cascade is the same everywhere: hot air, dry ground, dead trees, and then fire. Classrooms, rivers, algae, forests. Each failure enables the next.

Fontainebleau is not a faraway story. It is 300 kilometres from here. The same heat dome covers both countries. The same patterns are playing out. France sent planes north for the first time. The question is whether that becomes routine.