'The problem has been extremely high winds': Wildfires sweep through southwest France

France is also battling several large wildfires in the southwest. Authorities have ordered the precautionary evacuation of several towns on the outskirts of Bordeaux as the flames move toward the city. More than 140,000 people have already been evacuated, mostly from tourist areas on France's southwestern coast, what the French interior minister has described as an unprecedented situation. A thousand soldiers have been sent to help fight the fires that have already ravaged an area more than twice the size of Paris. Earlier I spoke to our reporter Luke Schrago who was himself evacuated from his hotel in the middle of the night. It was a short night for all too many people in the Gironde region overnight from Friday to Saturday after a news of 150,000 evacuation orders underway across the Gironde and the Londes region to the south. New alerts coming in in the small hours on Saturday with seven communes to the west of Bordeaux including around about 60,000 people nearly, some of them under partial evacuation orders as what authorities called a preventive measure went into effect. Now our hotel over near Marignac airport, we got word at about half past three in the morning, hotel staff going around knocking on doors saying that the hotel had to close and that people had to leave. These push alerts coming in, we saw them all yesterday afternoon and we've been having them this morning as well. It overrides silent mode on your phone, it pushes it through giving you loud warnings that really grab your attention. Now the problem has been extremely high winds, it's been extremely dangerous following these tinderbox dry conditions what the firefighters have all been describing as unfavorable conditions so the authorities really a more preventive measure to prevent any harm coming to anyone as the winds come from the west with the danger that this fire could easily move forward to the west towards Bordeaux. A lot of guests confused at the hotel, a lot of anger as well were mixed with resignation, people not really sure what they could do. The authorities issued a press release with evacuation routes towards Bordeaux sending people to, as you can see behind me, the Parc des Expositions exhibition center here in Bordeaux. They've got 500 beds here, food and water but all too many people showing up, hundreds and hundreds of cars just out of sight behind the camera, people sleeping in their cars, people with pets, cats, dogs and bird cages, a few of them with little idea of where to go. The smoke drifting again everywhere you go at this point you can smell the smell of burning and the odor of smoke and more of the feeling of apprehension with everyone we've spoken to wondering where this might end.