As Mario Freitas, a carpenter, walked through what was left of the wooden house that he built himself a decade ago, his brother-in-law pulled scraps of carbon fiber from a pile of charred rubble.
“That’s my carbon bike; it was a present,” said Mr. Freitas, 61.
The remains of his bicycle were among the few recognizable pieces of debris that were left in his property on Monday after an inferno swept through his village last month, reducing even concrete to dust. Of Mr. Freitas’ home and workshop, all that otherwise remained were a pile of roof tiles and scraps of metal, including several bed frames.
“It’s pretty hard to see how we can be compensated,” Mr. Freitas said in a toneless voice, gazing at the ruins in his garden. “In any case, it’ll never match what we’ve lost,” he added.
He was holding back tears so that his wife would not see him cry.
It was the first time in 13 days that Mr. Freitas had been allowed back to the home where he had lived for a decade. His village, Le Porge, was in the path of France’s biggest fire in decades, which tore through more than 100,000 acres of forest and spurred the largest peacetime evacuation in the country’s history.
Le Porge, 20 miles west of Bordeaux, was hit the hardest of any village in the region. The blaze burned through half the town’s land — some 17,000 acres, most of it forest. Of the 240 houses destroyed across the region, about 180 of them were in Le Porge, or about a fifth of its total housing stock.
The disaster has left residents feeling traumatized, powerless and sometimes angry — amid questions over whether evacuation warnings and firefighting efforts were sufficient.
Government officials have promised that these issues will be examined in an official investigation. For now, they said that firefighters were deployed in adequate numbers and did their best in an impossible situation. They also said that evacuations across the area were staggered to prevent traffic jams.
“People don’t understand why so many houses burned,” Mayor Martial Zaninetti said as he welcomed home the first returning villagers.
The fire started on July 22, about six miles from Le Porge, likely after a brush-clearing machine set off sparks on the outskirts of another town, according to prosecutors. Within hours, parts of Le Porge were being evacuated.
Mr. Freitas had just returned home from work, he said, when a police officer knocked on his door, asking his family to leave.
“I didn’t think we’d have to evacuate right away, so I figured I’d just sit down and eat, since I’d just arrived,” Mr. Freitas said.
After the policeman returned again 15 minutes later, the Freitas family finally gathered some clothes and left for a neighboring town, “thinking we’d be back here anyway,” Mr. Freitas said. But the following day, July 23, that town was evacuated, too, so they moved to a campsite farther away.
Other villagers were far slower to evacuate Le Porge, even as the blaze began to destroy some of its houses.
They thought the fire would avoid their part of the town, they said, partly because they did not receive an order to evacuate. The village municipality’s Facebook page did not announce a full evacuation until the early hours of July 24.
Matthieu Plessis, 40, a bike mechanic, went door to door on the day the fire broke out, trying to persuade residents to leave. Conchita Laudoyer, 72, said Mr. Plessis was the only person who warned her to leave. “You saved our lives,” she told him later.
After evacuating his animals, Mr. Plessis returned alone the next day to help the firefighting effort.
He headed to the community hall, which the firefighters were using as their makeshift headquarters. He found that many of them had left, he said, to set up firebreaks south of the village, near the Cap Ferret Peninsula, a popular tourist destination.
Mr. Plessis escaped again that afternoon, he said, on a road lined with flames beneath an orange sky darkened by smoke. An hour later, Mr. Plessis’s neighbor, who was using his surveillance cameras to watch the scene from afar, told Mr. Plessis that the blaze had reached his yard.
That evening, flames also reached a field where a stockpile of shells had been buried during World War II, setting off hundreds of them. “The 40-meter-high flames, the noise, the heat and the sound of the shells — it was like a war zone,” Mr. Zaninetti, the mayor, said of the second night of the fire, when the blaze was most intense.
Evacuees like Mr. Freitas and Mr. Plessis volunteered over the following days with firefighters across the region, including bringing water to the front lines, they said.
The villagers were finally allowed home on Monday, Aug. 3. Smoke was still rising in places, and mine experts were clearing the field of remaining shells.
Mr. Plessis’s house had been in the family for seven generations. He had spent two decades refurbishing its interior and cultivating an idyllic garden filled with exotic plants.
Only its walls were still standing.
He also lost boats, a motorbike, an old car and the workshop where he built his bikes.
Insurance, he said, might cover the cost of the tools and the material. “But the days, the nights spent working,” he said, before breaking off, unable to finish his sentence.
“I had so many plans for this house,” he added.
Sophie Brocas, the regional prefect, the area’s most senior state official, joined the villagers as they returned home on Monday. She warned that “the forest remains dangerous,” as she visited the village school where residents were being provided with psychological and legal support.
Ms. Brocas’s presence did little to temper frustration from the villagers.
Ludivine Daurignac, 45, lost the house she lived in with her husband and two children.
Helped by a lawyer, Ms. Daurignac is pooling accounts from residents, aiming eventually to pursue legal action. “We want answers to the ‘whys,’” Ms. Daurignac said.
“Why didn’t our siren work? Why didn’t we receive an alert by text message?” she said on Monday during a residents’ gathering. “Why did our firefighters lack the necessary resources?” she added.
Questions have also been asked of individual residents, some of whom did not adhere to a law requiring them to clear all bushes within 50 meters, or roughly 54 yards, from their house.
The government acknowledged this week that forests must be managed differently — with more firebreaks and different kinds of trees — to make it harder for blazes to spread.
“We’re going to rebuild all of this, probably in a different way, so that future generations don’t fall back into the same mistakes,” Mr. Zaninetti said. He added that he had asked President Emmanuel Macron for a regional “Marshall Plan,” referring to the massive economic assistance that the United States provided to Europe after World War II to regenerate its war-battered infrastructure.
Though some residents want to stay and rebuild, others are not so sure. Joël Pereira, 51, who works for a company renting out luxury properties on the Cap Ferret Peninsula, lost two houses and a garage in the fire. Now, he said, he wants to tear down the ruins and the remaining structures, and resell the land.
Joy Villette, who lived in Le Porge with her boyfriend and two young children, also said she wasn’t sure if her family would return. “We lost everything,” said Ms. Villette, 34.
“The smell and everything, it’s not easy,” she said of the stench of burned material. “And then arriving at the scene and seeing how little is left.”
Sifting through the ruins of the home they rented, Ms. Villette and her partner couldn’t find anything intact except for a small model house made from porcelain.
Mr. Freitas, the carpenter, pointed out a new sprout on his banana tree — a tiny speck of green in a sprawl of charred ground.
“The vegetation will grow back,” Mr. Freitas said. “The wound will heal over time. Only time can heal us.”
