(Strasbourg) “Very likely the driest month of July” since 1958: France, where a new fire covered 650 hectares on Tuesday evening in the Hérault, has been facing a drought for weeks which has prompted the authorities to impose restrictions of water use in 90 departments, a “record”.
Updated yesterday at 3:33 p.m.
“On average over France, eight millimeters of precipitation fell from 1er on July 25”, or “a huge deficit of precipitation”, indicated Christian Veil, climatologist at Météo-France.
Consequence: “July 2022 will most likely be the driest July on record since 1958”, according to a spokesperson for the meteorological agency.
Another “record”: that of “the number of departments with restrictions” on the use of water, according to the Ministry of Ecological Transition. Of 96 departments, only Aisne, Ariège, Corrèze, Hauts-de-Seine, Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis are not affected by at least one prefectural decree limiting certain uses of water, according to the government drought information site, Propluvia.
The State has mobilized the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB) to carry out checks and ensure compliance with the restrictions. “Since the start of the drought decrees, at the beginning of the summer, the OFB has carried out 1,400 checks, with compliance rates of 80 to 90%”, explained to AFP Loïc Obled, deputy director general of the Office.
The Loire at its lowest
The Propluvia map summarizing the different alert levels has turned red in a good part of the west of the Loire basin, but also in the Drôme, the interior of the Var or the Lot. In these areas, only water withdrawals for priority uses are authorized. Harvesting for agricultural purposes is prohibited.
The flow of the Loire is down sharply, to 129 m3 per second on July 20, compared to 475 m3/s at the beginning of the month and Loire-Atlantique has been on “drinking water alert” since July 20.
The Waters and Rivers of Brittany association pleads for even stricter restrictions.
In Lorraine, the low flow of the Moselle forces the Cattenom nuclear power plant to draw the water intended to cool its facilities from a neighboring reservoir.
In Franche-Comté, several municipalities in the Doubs no longer have drinking water and are supplied by tank trucks, according to the prefecture.
For its part, the Vaucluse has banned access to all of its forest areas for the day due to the high risk of fire.
Ditto in the Bouches-du-Rhône where the prefecture extended until Wednesday the closure of the 25 forest massifs of the department, including the very touristy Calanques National Park.
The Var or Haute-Corse have also cordoned off several massifs.
In a summer already marked by the resurgence of fires, a fire of very dry Mediterranean vegetation, in an area difficult to access about twenty kilometers from Montpellier (Hérault), had covered 650 hectares on Tuesday evening.
Some 130 people were evacuated preventively in the town of Aumelas, as well as 150 gathered for a wedding, according to the prefecture.
“Dried in place”
On Monday, the two fires which had ravaged more than 20,000 hectares of forest in Gironde had been “fixed”, according to the prefect, Fabienne Buccio.
In Burgundy, the drought red alert only concerns the Beaune area (Côte d’Or), renowned for its wines, suggesting that the harvest will still be very early. The 2020 record could even be beaten, when the harvest started on August 16, unheard of since… 1556.
Traffic on the rivers and canals is also very disrupted: navigation is interrupted on part of the Burgundy canal and in the Nancy region, while many barges on the Rhine are only loaded to a third of their capacity, for do not scrape the bottom of the river.
Agriculture is also very affected. “For non-irrigated corn producers, we think we will lose between 30 and 40% of production with the combination of drought and heat”, estimated Laurent Badin, commercial director of Maïsadour, the first corn collector in the southwest. .
The fauna is also sticking out its tongue, with water points “which are becoming rarer”, forcing the animals “to go much further”, which increases the “risk of collision on a road” or exhaustion, s alarm Jean-Baptiste Decotte, of the LPO Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.
“We had a big impact this year on the reproduction of amphibians and dragonflies, water beetles”, he observes, referring to “larvae which have dried on the spot”.