After a fierce fight, firefighters got the better of the second wave of fires in Gironde.
It’s a nice little house, unpretentious. Under its blond tiled roof, a dark wooden gable recalls its peasant origins. In the photo shown by Sylvie Dupouy, the sun is shining high and clear. She had sold this old barn to her carpenter son, who had repaired it with his own hands. Floor, partitions, floor, Alexandre had everything done for two years.
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House completely destroyed by flames on the night of August 9 to 10, in the hamlet of Joué, municipality of Belin Beliet on August 14, 2022 in Joué.
© Virginie Clavieres
On Sunday August 7, he had finally hung the rack with his group of friends from the Belin-Béliet handball club. Tents in the garden, music, guinguette atmosphere… Two days later, on Tuesday evening, this district not far from the city center was evacuated. “The fire was 5 kilometers away and the wind was not blowing in our direction; I was calm, I thought I could come back very quickly, ”says the young man, staying with his partner in a locality south-west of Bordeaux. But the next day, when he wakes up, a fireman friend telephones him, his voice choking with tears: his house, he tells him, is nothing more than a charred ruin. Like sixteen other homes in the town, victims of a resumption of the fire which ravaged the south of the Gironde in mid-July. Reappearing Tuesday, August 9, the fire ran, voracious, enveloping the territories of Belin-Béliet, Hostens, Saint-Magne, and devastating 7400 hectares of vegetation. A thousand firefighters, supported by Polish, Romanian, German and Austrian contingents, were deployed to contain the monster.
The show is terrible. The pine forests look like giant ashtrays. The birds seem to have vanished
Opposite the land of Alexandre Dupouy, on the other side of the departmental road, stand other ruins. Of a building which we guess was once imposing, only a few walls remain, floating in a pile of shattered tiles. A car wreck completes the sorry picture. Sonia, a neighbor in a dress and slippers, explains with a dismayed grimace: “The couple who lived there will have a hard time recovering. They lived for five years in a mobile home, the time to restore these old stables. They had just finished the interior work…” Magalie Bonnet was luckier. On the front of his Hostens property buried in the woods, a banner proclaims: “Thank you to the firefighters!”
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On the fateful evening, this little bit of a blonde woman waited until 2 a.m. to leave the house with her husband and their teenage daughter. “We always cling to the hope that the fire will spare you,” she smiles. Finally, the family emptied the premises under a rain of cinders, not without having first evacuated their horses. When leaving, Magalie came across a providential column of firefighters. “They fought like lions all night long to protect our house and those around it,” the 49-year-old salesperson still gratefully recalls. The house of the Bonnets for seventeen years, a high residence of red brick, is intact. Just like their precious airial, the traditional Landes garden, a vast clearing planted with a few hundred-year-old oaks. But their 35 hectares of pines could not be saved. “We can sell a few fragments of wood to make pellets, but it’s not even sure that it will bring in enough to replant,” sighs Magalie, who had designed this plantation as an inheritance for their two children.
A hurricane of flames near Saint-Magne, where the fires resumed on August 9. More than 1,000 firefighters will be mobilized to the area.
© V. Clavieres
The fire was set on August 14 but the war is far from over. Blame it on the persistent summer drought, but above all on the particular geological composition of the Landes de Gascogne. Since the drainage of the marshes and the sanitation of the country in the 19th century, the natural environment there has been rich in peat. This organic matter, resulting from the fossilization of plants, is an ideal fuel for the flames. In the basement, the seemingly extinct blaze can smolder for weeks, even months, before starting up again. Peat fires, a sneaky enemy that JeanFrançois Viel knows well. “These are phantom fires, we don’t see them and they suddenly take hold,” explains the pensioner with a melodious accent. In 2020, the Belin-Béliet volunteer firefighter was mobilized on a fire in Tuzan, a village about twenty kilometers away. “We intervened in July,” he recalls. Well! in October, we were still watering. There were reruns everywhere.”
A wall of fire 300 meters long and 30 meters high
The flames are extinguished but the peat fires – or “zombie fires” – continue, they are responsible for the resumption of the fire of Landiras 2 (Gironde), which had already destroyed 14,000 hectares in July, August 12, 2022 in Belin Beliet. According to authorities and firefighters, these underground fires, which have been smoldering since July, had an accelerating role in the resumption of the blaze – which burned 7,400 hectares on August 12, 2022
© Virginie Clavieres
On the roads that criss-cross the region, the spectacle is terrible. Straight pine forests as far as the eye can see look like giant ashtrays. Many pines are still standing but will fall by themselves in the next few days, the roots devoured by the embers. Others are already reduced to glowing, smoking stumps. The town of Belin-Béliet, still evacuated of its 6000 souls this Saturday August 13, is also worth a look. Everything is strangely silent, even the birds seem to have vanished. In a housing estate of neat houses, close to the forest, the gates are gaping. Residents have been instructed to leave them open to facilitate access for firefighters if needed. Sometimes the firefighters had to unhinge them themselves to create access. Lawn mowers, trampolines, vegetable garden utensils, children’s huts, the gardens of the dwellings are frozen as in a theater set. Often, the residents of Belinés evacuated in an emergency have left their pets at home. A team of volunteers, coordinated by the municipality’s animal welfare assistant, goes from house to house to ensure their well-being. The instructions left by the owners have been transcribed on a document: “Chicken coop at the bottom of the garden. The grain is in the blue can”; “The cats are outside, fill the bowls please.”
Wildlife, on the other hand, runs more serious risks: burns, dehydration, disappearance of its pantry set on fire… But it can count on the care of Alexis Le Danois, 33, a real animal firefighter. Shaved head, communicative smile, this former fire safety officer in Paris founded the Urgences Poilus association a few weeks ago, to help animals in distress. In the medicalized Kangoo of Alexis, a young deer also receives first aid, before being taken care of by agents of the Sud-Gironde animal park. Dehydrated and injured in the eye, he was found a few hours earlier, prostrate in a ditch in the forest. This is not the first deer that Alexis Le Danois takes care of. “In the past two weeks, he testifies, I recovered seven. Five died before we could entrust them to the veterinarians.”
The blaze made short work of this property in a hamlet of Belin-Béliet. For the victims, authorized on August 14 to return, the hardest part begins.
© AP/Sipa.
As we evacuate the small deer in a transport cage, we have to see the volunteers of Joué (a place called Belin-Béliet), big fellows almost all tattooed, contemplate the scene with tenderness. Often hunters, they know the terrain perfectly and have fought tirelessly in recent days to save their hamlet surrounded by flames. On the morning of this Sunday, August 14, Édouard Masse brought them together under a large awning in the center of the village. “It rained last night and it is expected to fall again by Wednesday. Knock on wood… while there’s still some left!” launches to the small crowd this thirty-year-old cut like a Viking, representative for the sector of the DFCI (trade union association for the defense against fires). “We will continue to do surveillance with three pick-ups, he adds. In any case, congratulations to all. If we hadn’t been there, it would have been a mess.”
And that’s an understatement. Tuesday evening, nearly 800 hectares of the in-laws of Édouard Masse, large loggers, went up in smoke. “The flames arrived nine meters from the house of my in-laws,” says the young man of Bordeaux origin. We had in front of us a wall of fire 300 meters long and 30 meters high. Fortunately, the firefighters, then present in number, defended the houses step by step. But the following days, they were regularly called to the rescue to other municipalities. “Thursday, we ended up with three trucks, explains Édouard Masse. It was a horrible and morally very hard day!”
Without drinking water or electricity, about thirty volunteers take turns night and day to put out the peat fires. With the means at hand: water tanks perched on pick-ups. Farmers, called in as reinforcements by Édouard, also soaked the edges of the roads with their huge slurry spreaders. Other inhabitants of Joué organize themselves to supply volunteers and firefighters with drinking water and food. A sense of mutual aid that impresses this firefighter from the Rhône department: “The solidarity of the people here is insane… in the good sense of the term.” A certain tenacity is also. However dejected he is, and even before having taken the steps with the insurance, Alexandre Dupouy has forged a resolution: he will rebuild his house identically. At the same location.