For days after she and her partner were evacuated from their apartment in Lège-Cap-Ferret, Naomie Corsaint and her family tried to find out what happened to the house they'd lived in for a decade in nearby Le Porge, where a forest fire raged. Photos and videos trickled in, mostly from firefighters already hard at work. She didn't get to see the scale of the devastation until she was granted permission to visit the community Sunday. When she arrived, she saw only the cinder walls of her mother's house were left. "The town we used to know is gone," Corsaint said Tuesday. "You can’t even get your bearings anymore; the houses we used to see when driving by — there’s nothing left. It’s all ash."Corsaint and her family are among the more than 250,000 people evacuated from their homes in France as fires spread at an unprecedented rate near Bordeaux. In Spain, more than 116,000 people have had to leave their communities as fires continue to burn there, too. Scientists say climate change is the primary driver behind the extraordinary fire conditions gripping western Europe, with a fourth heat wave of the season settling over the region this week. But they also say the scale of the fires cannot be understood without looking at how humans transformed the landscape itself. Noamie Corsaint's family's house was burned in the wildfires in Le Porge, northwest of Bordeaux, in France this week. (Submitted by Naomie Corsaint)Pine forest dates back to Napoleon IIIThe pine forest stretching southwest of Bordeaux has long been one of France's great engineering success stories. In the mid-1800s, under Napoleon III, vast wetlands considered unhealthy and unproductive were drained and replaced with a pine forest. The new forest transformed the local economy, produced timber and resin and made the area habitable. Nearly two centuries later, that same landscape is burning. "This isn't a fire in a natural forest," said Raphaël Morera, an environmental historian at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. "It’s a fire in a forest that was planted there to support an industrial activity."Morera says natural forests tend to contain a greater diversity of tree species and more interruptions that can slow a fire's advance. In the Landes, by contrast, "there are no natural obstacles to the fire's expansion," leaving firefighters to do almost all the work of stopping it.PHOTOS | Scientists say the fires burning in France and Spain are unprecedented in scale:While France's firefighters are among the best equipped in Europe, the fires themselves are changing faster than emergency services can adapt, says Guillermo Rein, a professor of fire science at Imperial College London.What's more, European countries rely on each other for labour and equipment, but when fires rage in many countries at once, that becomes more difficult, especially with aging Canadair tanker fleets. Soil no longer retaining waterAmid successive heat waves and months of unusually dry conditions, the landscape has lost much of the moisture that normally helps limit fire behaviour, according to Sylvain Delzon, a forest ecophysiologist at the University of Bordeaux and France's National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment."It's a sandy soil that doesn't retain water. So all the undergrowth was completely dried out and dead, becoming fuel for the fire."In terms of scale and spread, the fires in France share some similarities with the 2016 Horse River Fire that prompted the evacuation of Fort McMurray in Alberta, said Stefan Doerr, a professor of wildfire science at Swansea University in Wales. WATCH | Homes destroyed by fire:Drone video shows homes reduced to ashes, rubble by wildfire in southwestern FranceJuly 28|Duration 0:51A massive wildfire in southwestern France has left parts of the town of Biscarrosse in ruins, with drone footage from Tuesday revealing burnt homes and forest. Fires across France have forced the unprecedented evacuation of tens of thousands of people."In both cases the fire behaviour is quite extreme," Doerr said, noting the fires in France have created their own weather system — a phenomenon that also occurred around Fort McMurray, with the fire creating its own high winds and lightning. 'All we could see was smoke'This week, images of a gigantic black cloud above France spread online. The cloud, a pyrocumulonimbus, is composed of the moisture evaporated from burnt trees and vegetation, in addition to soot particles. It is formed by the energy and heat created by large forest fires pushing the air into the sky. To Corsaint, whose family home in Le Porge burned, and her boyfriend Matteo Martins, the results were "almost apocalyptic." Before the couple had to leave their apartment in Lège-Cap-Ferret last week, they watched as the sky around them turned black."All we could see was smoke. Ash fell on the balcony," Corsaint said. "Then, at night, the sky was orange and red. You could hear planes, police sirens, everything except other people."You can only see these fire clouds during huge wildfiresAs Trump threatens wildfire smoke tariffs, Canada looks to reduce fire riskSophie Wilkinson, a wildfire and peatland researcher at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who studied the Alberta wildfire — where there were also drained wetlands — said climate change is exposing the legacy of earlier land-use decisions."The era of denialism and pushing climate change into the future as a future issue is really gone."WATCH | Fires generating their own thunderstorms:Europe’s wildfires are creating their own weather systemsJuly 27|Duration 1:58Wildfires in Europe have become so powerful they have created their own thunderstorm-generating weather systems. This has officials in France and Spain urging more be done to prevent the fires from starting.Wilkinson said extreme heat, drought and wildfire are symptoms of human-caused climate change, adding that protecting and restoring ecosystems such as peatlands must also be part of the response.Susan Page, professor of physical geography at the University of Leicester in England who has spent decades studying peatlands, echoed Wilkinson's comments. "I think it's right that we now — rather than talking about climate change — talk about climate breakdown," Page said. "That's what we're starting to see, because the fires that are happening in France and Spain are of a scale that we never imagined."Naomie Corsaint says her mother and step-father have been crying every day over their lost home, which had also served as her mom's workplace. In their town, roughly 150 others saw their houses burn down. Corsaint and Martins know it will take months to rebuild. And they worry that once the headlines die down, people will forget. "None of it feels real," she said.