“We still have to be careful since the season is not over.insists this Monday morning on France Bleu Vaucluse the director of the departmental fire and rescue services, the general controller Jean-Claude Sammut. The season has been difficult. It’s been long, it’s not over”. After a scorching, early and particularly dry summer, the fire risk remains high in the departmentand soon coupled with the risk of violent storms linked to Mediterranean episodes. “We always remain mobilized and very cautious and we therefore maintain, depending on the weather conditions, a preventive system every day”he adds.
And if the impressive images of the fires in Gironde were particularly striking this summer, the Vaucluse was not spared. The department’s firefighters counted 643 brush fire starts this summer, compared to 248 over the same period last year. “We more than doubled the area we had burned at the same time last year, which therefore required a lot of effort, a lot of mobilization”insists Jean-Claude Sammut.
The number of forest fire starts remains equivalent to that of summer 2021, but the area burned in Vaucluse is much lower: 32 hectares in 2022 against nearly 300 in 2021, including 258 hectares in Beaumes-de-Venise. “If we rely on the figures, indeed, we have figures that are low compared to what other departments have experienced, and in particular the department of Gironde. We have been spared enough, we can only welcome it. And yet, we were one of the departments that had the highest risk of forest fires during the season “recalls the director of Sdis de Vaucluse.
We will have to learn the lessons of the fires we had this summer
Jean-Claude Sammut also announces that the firefighters of Vaucluse will renew in 2023 the rental of the water bomber helicopter rented for the last two summers. “This year, we rented him for a long period since he was with us from July 14 and left us on August 21, he explains. It is a helicopter which has all its interest in the fight against incipient fires, since we are well in this policy of putting the maximum of chances on our side on these incipient fires “. This helicopter handled 19 missions this summer in Vaucluse and carried out 115 drops, for a total of 22 hours of fighting all the fires that occurred in the department.
As for the question of investing in new fire-fighting means, Jean-Claude Sammut does not comment. “We have the largest European air fleet here in France, is it sufficient? It’s not for me to say. But we will have to learn the lessons of the fires we had this summer, and which will certainly unfortunately reproduce with the heat wave and drought effect, the years to come.