00:00Marseille Airport has been forced to close after a wildfire broke out in southern France.
00:04According to local authorities, planes have not been taking off or landing since midday
00:10and some flights have been diverted to nearby airports.
00:13Residents in the city's 16th district have been instructed to remain indoors.
00:18For more on the latest, we can bring in France 24's Chris Bachman.
00:22Chris, talk us through what exactly is going on in Marseille right now.
00:25That's right.
00:26The area you talked about just outside Marseille was where the fires started, a place called Mirabeau.
00:32It's only about 20 kilometers or so from Marseille.
00:35And on the edge, the 16th you talked about, some of it people will be familiar with because some of it's quite lawless.
00:43There's some big housing estates and a lot of drug dealing sitting there.
00:46But there's also a lot of homes and there's kind of wild land there as well.
00:51It's very near a place called Estac, which is quite touristy as well.
00:55And the flames have started looking at the outskirts of Estac, which tells you that you're really on the edge of Marseille right now,
01:01which is, of course, the second city.
01:03I've just checked the airport and, of course, nothing will be coming in or out for a long time.
01:07Everything is cancelled, like you said.
01:09It's a pretty severe situation considering it's the second city, just over a million people.
01:13And it's a very congested, it's kind of a city which is kind of very compact, surrounded by hills and mountains and a lot of wild scrubland as well.
01:24And so they're used to having fires, but they don't usually lick right close to the city center and especially this early into the summer season as well.
01:32And, Chris, this is not the only fire affecting the south of France, is it?
01:37That's right.
01:38And just to turn, the only kind of, the only glimmer of hope in Marseille is that they have the tongue, the bear.
01:44It's a massive, anyone who's flown into Marseille, know there's a massive sort of indoor, internal lake.
01:49So they can scoop up water pretty rapidly to get to those flames.
01:52Unfortunately, the wind's quite high.
01:54It's around between 40 and 70 kilometre gusts.
01:57And there's another major fire, just like you mentioned, near the town of Narbonne, which is in between Montpellier and Perpignan.
02:04It's a beautiful area.
02:06There's some amazing historic villages there called Bages and Perillac.
02:10And they've really been under threat in the last 36 hours.
02:13A scrubland there has gone up as well.
02:15The motorway has been closed between, it's called the A9, which goes all the way from, basically from Montpellier down to Spain.
02:22And at this time of the year, the holidaymakers will be numerous.
02:25There's been closed, open and closed because of the smoke.
02:28And the prefect of the area, and there's hundreds of firefighters literally dealing with that one as well, says that this is not under control yet.
02:35The problem is that this part of the country as well also has strong winds on a regular basis.
