What actually gets disrupted, and how
Patterns from this season so far — each card notes what has already happened this month, so you know these aren’t hypotheticals. Smoke gets its own section: it rarely stays where the fire is.
Motorways
- Fires beside the carriageway close motorways with little warning, typically for hours until wind shifts.
- The A9 (Narbonne–Perpignan), A61 (Carcassonne–Narbonne) and A7/A8 around Orange and Aix are the repeat offenders.
- Smoke across the road brings sudden slowdowns even when lanes stay open.
Local roads
- Départementale roads through fire zones get cut for firefighting access — detours in the hills can add hours for a van.
- Burnt zones stay closed afterwards for falling-tree and landslip risk.
Rail
- Above roughly 37 °C, SNCF applies speed restrictions — expect delays rather than cancellations on TGV Sud-Est and Occitanie routes on peak-heat days.
- Fires near the line suspend service outright; the Narbonne–Perpignan and Marseille–Toulon corridors both run through fire country.
Campsites & aires
- Campsites in pine country evacuate preventively — sometimes at night. Know your site's assembly point and keep the van reversed in and fuelled.
- High-risk days bring total fire bans: no BBQ, no camping stove outdoors, in some communes no smoking outdoors.
Forest & massif access
- Mediterranean départements publish a daily map rating every massif; red = closed to everyone, including through-roads and marked trails.
- Wild/free camping is banned and enforced across the fire-risk zone all summer.
Heat-related services
- Canicule days strain local power grids — brief outages happen; keep devices and the leisure battery topped up.
- Drought-hit communes restrict water: aire service points sometimes shut off. Fill tanks when you can, not when you must.
Where smoke goes — it's not where the fire is
Smoke is a downwind problem, and downwind can be a long way. On mistral or tramontane days (the dominant NW winds of the Med arc), plumes stream south-east — so a fire in the Corbières hills hazes Narbonne's beaches, and an inland Provence fire can smoke out the coast 30–50 km away while the town next to the flames stays clear. When the wind flips, so does the problem.
Long-range drift is real. On 25 July, people across the Aude reported a burnt smell with no local fire — the smoke had carried from the Gironde and Landes fires, roughly 300 km away. Don't use your nose to judge distance from danger; use the live fire map.
Nights are worse than days. Smoke settles into valley floors and basins after dark — the Étang de Berre bowl, the Argens valley behind Fréjus, and river gorges generally. If a fire is anywhere in your region, sleep on the coast or on high ground, not in a valley bottom.
Practical rule for van life: if you can see or smell smoke, close vents and windows, skip outdoor cooking, and check the air-quality map before deciding whether to move — driving into a plume on a motorway is worse than sitting tight in light haze.