The gigantic wildfire which, in barely more than 48 hours, burnt through about 17,000 hectares (42,000 acres) of vegetation and forestland in southern France this week was finally halted on Thursday.
However, almost 1,000 firefighters are to remain on the ground monitoring the situation as an intense heatwave and return of strong winds have been announced for the weekend.
At its height, 2,000 firefighters battled the huge wildfire, which ripped through the Corbières region of the Aude département (county), situated close to the Pyrenees mountain range which separates France and Spain. The flames advanced at a speed of around 5 kilometres per hour, fuelled by a dry and gusty wind and swathes of water-starved vegetation that acted as tinder. It has become what French environment minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher described as “the largest fire that France has seen since 1949”, and rolled across the picturesque, hilly and valleyed Corbières region, notably known for its vineyards. At one point, the width of the advancing wave of flames was close to 100 kilometres.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
A 65-year-old woman was found dead in her village home destroyed by the flames, while to date 23 people have been injured, 18 of them firefighters, one of whom is in a critical condition.
For an explanation of the magnitude of the fire, the tactics employed to contain it, and the lessons to be learned from it, Mediapart turned to Éric Brocardi, a senior officer with France’s fire brigade and who is spokesman for the National Federation of Firefighters (Fédération nationale des sapeurs-pompiers), an association that represents the interests of France’s fulltime and volunteer firefighters. The interview below by Mickaël Correia was carried out late on Thursday.
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Mediapart: Why has it been so long and complex to contain this wildfire?
Éric Brocardi: Because the speed with which it spreads is very fast, and its evolution is a little bit anarchic, with directional changes due to gusty winds and, due to the topography, corridors where it is accelerated.
The fire is spread over an unusually large surface area because of these accelerating effects but also because of the very violent wind which was present as of the very first flames and which blew continuously in the middle of the afternoon on Tuesday up until 3am, with gusts reaching 60 to 70 kilometres per hour.
Mediapart: Yet the Aude département has a certain culture of awareness about wildfires.
E.B.: Indeed. However, one quickly forgets that before it had started there were about eight other fires that had begun in the département and which were rapidly put out by the firefighters. But the ninth took off at an extremely fast rate.
The efficiency of the firefighting operations should not be placed in question. All those fires that are quickly contained are not picked up by the media, but obviously the focus is on the one that is exceptional, that being because its expansion is fanned by favourable conditions.
Mediapart: Is the strategy employed in France which consists of a massive response to nascent fires still effective given the multiplication of exceptionally vast wildfires?
E.B.: It continues to be so, all the more because numerous countries now try to adopt the same technique. But today, our methods of calculating and modelling the eventual trajectory that massive wildfires can take need to evolve fundamentally.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The fire in [the Corbières region] in the Aude département will represent a turning point for firefighters in terms of the battle to contain wildfires. We’ll bring our “software” up to date, integrating new data on the speed with which wildfires advance – and which in this case reached more than 5 kilometres per hour – and the feedback from the firefighters about their experiences.
The prospect of a wildfire like that in [the Corbières region] in the Aude département had never been envisaged. We based ourselves on the wildfires of 2003 and 2013. But as firefighters we have the capacity to be very humble towards fire, and to place ourselves in question so that, in the future, we can better anticipate, and be much more agile, in terms of anti-wildfire strategy.
Mediapart: A 65-year-old woman was found dead inside her home in the village of Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse after she refused to leave the house when it was threatened by the advancing flames. How does one react to a situation like that?
E.B.: It is a very difficult situation because it badly affects the firefighters. When you are at the heart of an emergency, when you have other homes to save, and when the person shuts themselves inside, what can you do? Knowing that often only a gendarme or two firefighters can be sent to try and convince the individual while, just close by, everything is burning. It’s heartbreaking on a daily basis. All through the year, during missions to rescue people, we are faced with persons who refuse to go to medical emergency services.
Mediapart: Have the human and material means employed in the Aude département been sufficient? The lack of sufficient numbers of Canadair firefighting planes in the national fleet has often been cited in public debate.
E.B.: There are two essential things to take into account. Firstly, aerial means alone amount to nothing, just as terrestrial means alone amount to nothing. It’s the combination of both which produces the effectiveness of the fight against fires. That’s what makes up our strength, and which other countries don’t have.
Another point here: it’s not everything to have lots of planes and vehicles. Men and women must be inside them. In France, 80% of firefighters are volunteers, and we have a 6,000-strong national network of fire stations which account for 4.7 million interventions per year.
With this wildfire [editor’s note: in the Corbières region this week], nobody knew about Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse [a village of around 750 inhabitants], and yet in this village there is a fire station which tried to contain, with its few personnel and modest vehicles, a wildfire that defied all comprehension. These rural fire stations are disappearing in silence in the wake of political or budgetary choices. Our plan of action is founded upon the history of forest fires, upon methods adjusted according to our training and numbers. The Canadair aircraft represent the tree that hides the forest. Without a proper public policy towards disaster and emergency services we won’t be able to respond to this new type of wildfire.
Mediapart: Are you saying that the state is not listening to you enough?
E.B.: After the government’s rethink [on public spending], the emergency services were affected by budget cuts. Moreover, we are threatened by a European [Union] directive concerning working hours which could lead to the assimilation of voluntary firefighters as staff, with the risk that there will [subsequently] be no-one on the ground. Finally, at a time of fires that are increasingly gigantic, there is still no junior minister responsible for disaster and emergency services.
We’re in the 21st century, but just yesterday I heard from the Corbières the accounts of inhabitants who fought the flames in an instinctive manner. They weren’t trained to do so.
Mediapart: You sometimes describe yourselves as “climate soldiers” [editor’s note: a play on words in reference to the popular French term for firefighters as “fire soldiers”].
E.B.: Climate warming is playing more and more of a role in our missions. Within the volume of our interventions, few, in the end, concern large fires, but the time spent on this type of dramatic incident is extremely long, and requires an important availability of volunteers.
Mediapart: Could not the response to these mega-wildfires be more at a European level?
E.B.: It could, and we recently had an English contingent [of firefighters] come for training in the Pas-de-Calais [département in north-east France]. But, once again, the battle is played out at a smaller scale. Following the wildfires in 2022, [French president] Emmanuel Macron launched the “forest fire capacity pacts” [a scheme to help finance the purchase of equipment] in order to help the SDIS [fire and rescue services of départements] to rapidly buy more vehicles. We have now purchased 7,000 tanker trucks, but the firefighters estimate that we must have 10,000 between now and 2030 in order to equip all the rural fire stations that criss-cross the mainland, so that we have a local fire-fighting response available.
Because, let’s remember, this [week’s] mega-wildfire didn’t begin out of a city like Lille or Nice, but came from Ribaute, a tiny village in the Aude département.
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- The original French version of this interview can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse