A British family visiting relatives in France found themselves sleeping in a tent in a stranger's garden after wildfires forced them to evacuate the seaside town of Biscarrosse. Melissa Sood, 33, her husband Sunny, 42, a police officer, their 14-year-old daughter, and her brother and sister had travelled to visit her 83-year-old grandmother when the fires broke out.
The family was out for dinner on July 23 when police ordered an evacuation. They raced back to the grandmother's house to grab passports and a few belongings before heading to the beach, where they joined hundreds of others. Melissa described the scene as 'chaos,' with water planes flying overhead and blackened air.
Sleeping on cardboard and sprinklers
After discovering that the local school evacuation centre only accepted residents, the family returned to the beach around 3 a.m. and tried to sleep on cardboard boxes pulled from a recycling bin. 'After about an hour the sprinklers turned on. We got no sleep whatsoever,' Melissa said.
A family friend of the grandmother later offered them a garden to camp in, so they bought a tent from a supermarket. With no blow-up beds available and only a few blankets, they have been sleeping there since Friday. The wildfires in the Gironde region have forced more than 200,000 people to evacuate, burning an area four times the size of Paris. French President Emmanuel Macron described the blazes as 'completely unprecedented' and the 'toughest since World War Two.'
Unable to return home
The family is due to fly back to Basingstoke on July 30, but they cannot return to the grandmother's house to collect their house keys and other belongings. Roads to Bordeaux airport are blocked by the fires, leaving them unsure how to reach their flight. 'I don't even have my house keys. All we've got is the clothes that we're wearing,' Melissa said. They are also receiving alerts that their current area may be evacuated.
The family contacted their insurance company, Philip Williams, which said it might cover expenses like the tent, and the British Embassy, but since the embassy is in Paris and the family cannot get there, no help was offered. Sunny said, 'There's absolutely no help for people like us, camping in gardens. Somebody needs to take ownership, either the insurance company, the British Embassy, or French officials.'
