Elisabeth Borne activates an interministerial drought crisis unit


PARIS (Reuters) – Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne has decided to activate the interministerial crisis unit in the face of the “historic drought” currently raging in France and calls on all French people to be “very vigilant” about the use of resources in water, announced Friday the services of Matignon in a press release.

“Faced with this historic situation, the Prime Minister has decided to activate the interministerial crisis unit and calls on everyone to preserve our water resources”, it is specified in this press release.

“France is experiencing a prolonged period of drought which today affects the entire territory, (…) the most serious ever recorded in our country”, and the weather forecasts suggest that this “situation could continue for the next 15 days, or even become even more worrying”, underlines Matignon.

This interministerial crisis cell will centralize the information provided by the prefects of the most affected departments, anticipate the possible activation of ORSEC “water” plans in order to coordinate the necessary civil security measures such as the water supply of the municipalities. or the delivery of drinking water, for example.

This body will also be responsible for monitoring the impact of the drought on energy production and transport infrastructure and the agricultural sector, in particular livestock farming, it is specified in the Matignon press release.

“The crisis unit is to anticipate the worst, hoping that it does not happen but telling ourselves that at that time we will be one step ahead to be able to react and avoid a rupture” water supply, said Friday at midday the Minister of Ecological Transition, Christophe Béchu, on the sidelines of a trip with his colleague from Agriculture, Marc Fesneau, during a press briefing in Roumoules (Alpes de Haute Provence).

“We are already at more than a hundred municipalities in France which today no longer have drinking water” and which are supplied by trucks”, he underlined, specifying that “all the metropolitan departments are now affected by restriction measures”, including 62 departments with crisis decrees which restrict water to priority uses only.

For Christophe Béchu, “the whole issue is to tighten a certain number of restrictions to avoid reaching this point in the territories where we realize that we have prolonged water deficits, and to be able to anticipate”.

“We’re not here to sound the alarm for fun, we’re just here to say ‘this is not a drill’,” he warned.

(Written by Myriam Rivet, edited by Nicolas Delame)



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