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Local officials recovered nearly 400 German and French mortar and anti-tank shells from the village of Le Porge after a forest fire detonated buried World War II munitions, according to Euronews. Mayor Martial Zaninetti told France Info that more than 100 explosions rang out on the second night of the blaze, likening the sounds to “the sound of war”. He added that the blasts, first thought to come from gas cylinders, sent projectiles “to the right, to the left” with one shell piercing a house.
The fire destroyed more than 180 homes in Le Porge and burned through 13,000 hectares as part of a larger Gironde blaze that has now been contained, Al Jazeera reported. Bomb disposal operations continue with certain areas still off limits even as families return to sift through the charred remains of their properties. Video from the scene showed specialists collecting ammunition scattered across scorched ground near residential buildings.
Zaninetti stated that ammunition depots had lain buried within the municipality without prior local knowledge until the heat of the wildfire set them off. The French Département du Déminage recovers about 900 tons of unexploded ordnance across the country each year, official records show. Since 1946 approximately 630 ordnance disposal workers have been killed handling such remnants.
France remains particularly affected by unexploded munitions from the world wars, which cause around 10 deaths nationwide annually, according to a France 24 report. Similar finds have included a large World War II bomb that halted train traffic near Paris’s Gare du Nord in 2025 and ongoing discoveries by farmers in northern regions known as the iron harvest. In Le Porge the munitions posed immediate risks as some detonated and scattered shrapnel into nearby structures.
The incident forms part of renewed wildfire activity in southwest France, where blazes this summer echo the 2022 fires that consumed more than 20,000 hectares in the same department and forced mass evacuations, regional assessments found. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu thanked firefighters for their work containing the latest outbreaks, noting the response had entered a new phase with evacuated individuals gradually returning. He described the overall effort as France standing firm against an unprecedented crisis.
Broader European wildfire conditions over recent weeks have led to significant displacements, with combined evacuations in France and Spain exceeding 250,000 at peaks of earlier outbreaks, according to weather service tallies. Officials in Gironde deployed thousands of firefighters, soldiers and aircraft to battle the flames amid strong winds and dry vegetation. Operations in Le Porge now focus on completing the clearance to restore full access while emphasising safety around any remaining munitions.
