“It was the summer of all dangers, we are on August 24, we are still going to grit our teeth a little”, commented this Thursday Olivier Véran, spokesperson for the government, during a trip to the Var. Because for the time being, despite the repeated scorching heat, no very large fire has so far occurred this year. The visiting minister was satisfied in a fire station in the Massif des Maures. Similarly, the slaughter of the 2003 heat wave, which had caused the premature death of 10,000 people, obviously did not happen again. “We have learned a lot since 2003”, estimated the minister who had gone at the very beginning of the afternoon in an Ehpad. Enough to feed the government’s narrative of the need for (successful) adaptation to climate change.
In this regard, the fight against forest fires is a priority and the government announced that same day that it would release a fund of 150 million euros, of which 1.65 million will go to the Var Intervention and Rescue Service. (Sdis 83). A sum which will allow the acquisition of six new vehicles to fight against forest fires.
On one of the sites of the Gonfaron fire, which, in 2021, had ravaged more than 7,000 hectares and killed two people, Olivier Véran came to have the story of the firefighters’ intervention explained to him. As soon as he stepped out of his air-conditioned sedan, the minister could feel a hot, dry wind from the west. “Here, it’s the foeh”, explained Eric Grohin, the departmental director of SDIS 83. a fire jump of more than 2,000 meters, a “rare, but not exceptional” distance, specifies the director in front of cork oaks with charred bark. But if the trunk remained black, its cork envelope made it possible to protect the perennial parts of the tree which was able in two years to redo leaves and branches. Nature clings.
3,800 wildfires in twenty years in the Var
“The problem of fires is not so much the fires themselves, the Mediterranean vegetation is adapted, but their frequency”, added an agent from the national forest office. And in this frequency, the part of human responsibility is enormous, considering thatone in four motor smokers admits they can throw their cigarette butts out the window and 90% of vegetation fires are of human origin. A context which did not escape the fire of Gonfaron, for which a man was indicted, suspected of having thrown the fateful cigarette butt. “What did he take”, inquired Olivier Minister from a gendarme, a criminal identification technician. The man has not yet been tried.
The firefighters were also able to present their intervention doctrine, based, among other things, on rapid and massive intervention: “in twenty years, we have had 3,800 fires in the Var. 97% were stopped before they covered five hectares. For the rest, we had three fires over this period which burned more than 5,000 hectares and which alone represent half of the burned areas, ”explained Eric Grohin. Necessarily, the Var is at the forefront of techniques for fighting forest fires which now also violently strike other regions, such as the Landes and Brittany, last year. Why set them up as an example for all French departments?
Time, all the attention of the firefighters is focused on this weekend and the beginning of the week to come, while the Mistral is announced. This while many firefighters in the southern zone are currently engaged in three fires in the Hautes-Alpes. So, here, we are going to scan the sky this weekend, where the scorching heat could well give way to a few more than welcome thunderstorms.