meeting with injured firefighters in Aubais

His face and arm bear the marks of his trauma. With his unit, Philippe Gruvel, mobilized in Aubais fire (Gard), found himself trapped by the flames, in his truck. “I couldn’t make any maneuver to leave because in fact, mechanically, the truck was blocked”, he remembers at the scene of the tragedy. On July 31, after the fire in Aubais (Gard) broke out, the flames progressed very quickly.

Inside the truck, with his teammates, the pressure and stress mount. They only have a few seconds to react. “We saw ourselves there, in fact, holding hands, saying to ourselves ‘that’s it, we’re going to do it'”testifies the sergeant-in-chief Julien Gaubert. “It happened so quickly that the cries of my driver, the looks of my teammates made me decide to leave the truck, […] the heat was so unbearable at the level of the truck”, he recalls. United, they cross together the fire which ravages the forest and manage to get out of it.