HORTENS, Gironde /PARIS (Reuters) – European reinforcements arrive this Thursday in France, where firefighters are mobilized against an unprecedented series of fires in several regions, while the government has shown in Gironde its determination to act “on all fronts” to improve firefighting in the future.
“Across the territory, more than 10,000 firefighters and civil security personnel are mobilized against the flames”, observed Emmanuel Macron on Twitter, welcoming the solidarity of several European countries which have promised reinforcements in the face of this crisis situation.
As part of the European Union’s Civil Protection Mechanism, four water bomber planes from Greece and Sweden have been dispatched to France, European Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarcic said on Twitter.
Also expected in France are more than 350 German, Austrian, Polish and Romanian firefighters who must transport around a hundred vehicles.
“Since June, our country has been facing exceptional fires,” said Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne during a press briefing in Hostens, in the south of Gironde, a department where one of the two major fires of July resumed on Tuesday and has already burned 6,800 hectares of forest.
In addition to Gironde, other departments are also currently facing major forest fires, including Lozère and Aveyron, Isère, Drôme, Jura and Maine-et-Loire.
Beyond emergency management, “I can assure you that we are strengthening our resources, we want to act on all fronts to fight even better in the future against these fires”, underlined Elisabeth Borne, who was accompanied by Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin.
“AN OGRE”
This notably involves the “major national project” of reforestation announced last month by the President of the Republic during a trip to Gironde then faced with two mega-fires, as well as by the already programmed reinforcement of the means of Civil Security. in the programming bill of the Ministry of the Interior scheduled for the start of the school year, recalled Elisabeth Borne.
“A new national plan for adaptation to climate change will be put together at the start of the new school year”, announced the Prime Minister, stressing “that we must continue more than ever to fight against climate change and that we also continues (…) to adapt to this climate change”.
The fight against the Girondin fire, which is also raging in the neighboring Landes, is complicated by particularly unfavorable climatic conditions due to the heat wave and the drought, especially since the firefighters have observed an “atypical” spread of the flames.
“The fire has a relatively atypical and aberrant behavior”, explained on BFMTV the lieutenant-colonel Arnaud Mendousse, communication officer of the Departmental Fire and Rescue Service (Sdis) of Gironde, underlining that it “spreads a little in all directions and not just downwind,” he said.
“He’s an ogre, he’s a monster”, judged for his part on RTL the president of the National Federation of Firefighters of France (FNSPF), Grégory Allione.
On the ground, weariness is beginning to be felt among local elected officials and residents, some of whom had already been forced to evacuate during the July fire, which was never extinguished but continued to smolder, buried under the peat of the Landes forest, before its resumption on Tuesday.
“It’s a real disaster, economic, ecological, it’s awful and the territory is totally disfigured. We’re disgusted, we’re exhausted, we’ve been fighting for a month, there, it’s the drop that’s overflowing the vase,” said the mayor of Hostens, Jean-Louis Dartiailh, on Classic Radio on Thursday.
According to data from the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis), 263 fires have already been recorded in France since the start of the year, with a total burned area of nearly 58,000 hectares (compared to 214 fires and 30,652 hectares of forest destroyed by fire over the whole of 2021).
The area that went up in smoke in 2022 alone at this stage represents the equivalent of almost six times the annual average of areas burned over the period 2006-2021.
(Report Stéphane Mahé in Hostens, Michel Rose and Sudip Kar-Gupta in Paris, written by Matthieu Protard, Myriam Rivet and Nicolas Delame, edited by Tangi Salaün)