“It’s like you’re fleeing this invisible force that’s coming towards you.”
That’s how Irish man James Halford describes how his family’s long-awaited holiday descended into chaos and confusion as wildfires swept across southwest France last week.
The family – James, his wife Clarissa, their children Ryan, 12, and Lara, 10, and James’s 76-year-old mother-in-law, Mieko – had been enjoying their first sun holiday in seven years when the campsite they were staying at near Biscarrosse was suddenly evacuated on Friday.
“We were literally just sitting down for dinner when this shrill alarm went off,” James, who works as a video editor at RTÉ, recalls.
“There was a man going around with a megaphone banging on doors shouting, ‘Get out, get out, get out!” It was quite scary … We could smell and then see the smoke.”
What followed was a tense ordeal lasting several days – with the family facing multiple evacuation orders while trying to find a safe way out of the region.
‘I felt like we were being hemmed in’
That first night, after driving along roads framed by large clouds of wildfire smoke, the family slept on judo mats in a sports hall that had been adapted into an evacuation centre in the town of Mios.
Smoke over the road while the Halford family were evacuating from their campsite
The following day, they were lucky enough to be offered a room in the home of a local English-speaking teacher.
But the wildfires were again advancing on them.
“We were about to go to bed in the teacher’s house when everyone’s phones started beeping again: Alert! Get out, get out, get out!” So now we had to drive through the night again.”
It was at this point that James admits he was starting to “freak out”.
“I felt like we were being hemmed in.
“I was looking at Google Maps, thinking ‘We can’t get out of here now. We’ve got the Bordeaux fires to the north, the Biscarrosse fires to the south. We were kind of trapped between them.”
Smoke over the campsite in Biscarrosse
The glow of the wildfire at night
‘It has restored my faith in humanity’
Eventually, however, they found their way to a new evacuation centre, where another local woman and her husband offered them a place to stay.
“The local community really rallied around,” he says.
“What this whole thing has really shown me is how kind people are. Everywhere we went, the local people were out in force and were volunteering, helping and inviting people back to their homes.
“It has restored my faith in humanity.”
Through it all, he says the kids were “great, not easily spooked,” though he admits the phone alerts succeeded in putting everyone on edge for days.
James and his family are now safely back in Ireland after making their way to Toulouse earlier this week, where they caught a flight home.
It is a huge relief after several days sleeping in camp beds, navigating road closures and trying to avoid the path of the destructive fires.
“It was certainly not the holiday we planned for.”
Read more: Two arrests as firefighters battle blazes near Bordeaux