Reality TV star Georgia Toffolo reveals she escaped French wildfires

Reality TV star Georgia Toffolo has revealed she narrowly escaped the French wildfires with her husband, Brewdog co-founder James Watt.

The 31-year-old said she was on holiday with family in Cap Ferret last week and left the place she was staying earlier than planned as she could smell the fires, adding in a post on her Instagram story that she is “praying that everyone’s OK”.

The former Made In Chelsea star said: “We were just watching the news, and just so you can understand, we were on holiday there for a week, and then we were at lunch with friends on Thursday, and… we knew about the fire, but at that point it was quite far away.

“And our friends were like: ‘Oh God, it’s really getting bad’, and they live there, so they were a bit more plugged in than us, and anyway, at that point, everyone was like… ‘everything’s OK, just stay put’.

“But the problem is with these wildfires, when the wind changes direction, the situation changes really quickly, so we were meant to be leaving on Friday anyway to fly up here, so we were dropping the kids off and then flying up… we’re in Iceland now.

“But James just said to me on Thursday, we had four children with us, he was just like: ‘I don’t like it,’ and we could smell stuff and there was like little bits of ash falling, so we got everyone packed up and anyway, we left by boat because the road was closed on Thursday and stayed at the airport on Thursday night.

“And our flights were already booked really early on Friday morning, but I just can’t stop thinking about (it), I mean, it was really quite distressing to see because it just increased and increased.”

Toffolo went on to say that they were “very lucky” as they left shortly before an evacuation of the area on Friday.

She added: “It’s just so awful, and so many firefighters have been injured, and it’s just a really horrible situation…

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“I just really hope everyone’s OK, but from everything that we saw, like it was being handled amazingly by the authorities, but they must be under so much pressure, and just like a really horrible, awful thing to happen.”

A quarter of a million people have reportedly fled their homes since the fires broke out in southern Europe on Wednesday.

Toffolo is best known for her regular appearances in E4’s Made In Chelsea between 2014 and 2018, and was also crowned queen of the jungle on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in the ITV reality show’s 17th series in 2017.