Monster fire stopped growing: France

Lege-cap Ferret: France’s interior minister said Monday that a monster wildfire has stopped growing after forcing 220,000 people out of their homes in the country’s southwest but cautioned that it isn’t yet beaten. “It hasn’t progressed during the night,” the minister, Laurent Nunez, said. “We have to remain very concentrated, very determined, to go at any moment.”

He spoke after French President Emmanuel Macron held a crisis meeting Monday focusing on the massive firefighting effort in the Gironde region and on wildfires elsewhere.

The Gironde blaze has burned an area four times the size of Paris. The region’s prefecture said the situation overnight had remained “globally stable” — a change from previous days where the giant blaze raging since last week edged closer to the wine region city of Bordeaux.

In the adjacent southwestern Landes region, where hundreds of firefighters have been making progress against another virulent but smaller fire, the prefecture said some rain fell overnight and described the conditions as “favourable” for firefighting but also cautioned that they could change.