The Minister for the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu promised this Wednesday during a visit to Guillos the arrival “in the next few days” of two additional sections in the South-Gironde. These 60 soldiers will be deployed around Landiras in order to monitor the forest and prevent any resumption of the fire. These reinforcements are added to the 60 soldiers currently already engaged in the fight against the fire which ravaged nearly 14,000 hectares.
“Congratulations and thank you for your commitment”
“I am challenged by the elected officials, by the president of the departmental council, by the parliamentarians on the follow-up to this fire, in particular this underground fire and that passes by the monitoring of this line of fire. This monitoring is normally the responsibility of the municipalities or the departmental fire and rescue service. You cannot ask the mayor of a rural municipality to perform tasks that are so difficult in such an extraordinary context. That’s why we had deployed the first two sections, to check that there was no resumption of fire, but also to deal with these resumptions of fire. These two sections, together, represent something like 60 soldiers. In view of the information I was able to gather on the ground, the meetings preparing for this trip and the discussions I had with the mayors, we are going to double the number of sections in the days to come. We are therefore going to go from 60 soldiers to 120 soldiers, which will make it possible to help rural municipalities to precisely ensure this fire surveillance and to deal with it.
“The somewhat bizarre controversy over the Canadair”
During his visit to Guillos, the Minister for the Armed Forces also judged “a little weird” the controversies over the Canadair. “There has never been an aerial device as powerful as that organized in Gironde in the entire history of French civil security”, said Sébastien Lecornu before calling “to a form of collective humility”.
Present this Wednesday alongside the minister, Jean-Luc Gleyze, the socialist president of the Gironde departmental council, maintained his remarks on the Canadair fleet. “It is necessary that [appareils] are permanently present in Gironde to intervene very quickly. We can’t wait 1 hour or 1 hour and a half for the Canadairs to arrive”.
“These fires are out of the ordinary, so we need human resources” (Sébastien Lecornu)
During his trip to the South-Gironde, the Minister of the Armed Forces recalled the commitment of the military in the fight against the fires of July. Caracal helicopters, drones and reconnaissance aircraft participated in the intelligence “by making sure from the air that there is no resumption of fire”.
– Jules Brelaz
“Public opinion or the national media tend to consider that the fires are over. Here, in Gironde, it is not so.”
The firefighters were also able to count on the reinforcement of the Engineers, “that is to say the ability to develop the terrain to create firebreaks or restore forest roads to allow firefighters to come into contact with the flames”.
At the height of the crisis, 200 soldiers took part in operations at La Teste-de-Buch and Landiras. In particular, they helped the gendarmes and the police during the evacuation of the more than 30,000 inhabitants.
– Jules Brelaz