More than 30,000 hectares of forest burned! This is the terrible toll of the summer fires in Gironde so far. Suffice to say that the atmosphere was not at all festive this Friday at the Barp during the general assembly of the foresters of the South-West. Between sadness and anger, words fail many of the 1,500 owners today to talk about what they have experienced, particularly in the Landes de Gascogne massif. Support and emergency aid will not erase everything and especially not the trauma, revived last week by the fire in Saumos in the Médoc or even in recent hours by that of Arès in the Arcachon Basin.
Foresters are calling for a precise and thorough investigation to understand what happened this summer. Today, there is still a lot of misunderstanding, particularly vis-à-vis the firefighters and the authorities, according to Jean-Héraud, one of the union’s vice-presidents: “Given the feedback we have, we are entitled to ask ourselves questions at the command level. Moreover, what we fail to understand is that 70 years ago, the forest mass was not developed as it is now. We made tracks, water points, boreholes, not to mention the equipment of the firefighters today and yet we had a fire as enormous as in 1948. It There’s something wrong. We have to review everything because today, it’s an economic and ecological disaster and above all a failure!”
Clean, reforest and above all secure forests
The words are strong and the silviculturists of the South-West hope to have answers to their questions very quickly. In the meantime, the priority is to clean up, reforest and above all secure the forests. At the podium, each speaker did not forget to recall this and necessarily quickly the question of access to the forest massifs came back on the table. “That we open up the forest with cycle paths, I manage to understand that. At home, there are no prohibition signs everywhere. Simply, we have to supervise that with the authorities, warns Jean-Pierre Héraud. The objective is to know when they will be there to be able to carry out prevention, for example. Now that the forest is open to all winds and to everyone when there are risks, I don’t agree.
Others can be much more radical: “As soon as a very severe risk is detected, measures must be taken immediately to prohibit entry into the forest”, launches Emmanuel de Montbron. This silviculturist based in Captieux also claims, like all his colleagues, to review the entire vigilance system. If this is not the case, everyone is going straight into the wall for Jean-Pierre Héraud: “If we continue like this, in three or four years there will be no more fire. Do you know why? Because there will be no more forests!”
All is not lost yet
For the moment, we are not there. There is even still a hope of not losing everything for the foresters affected by the summer fires. “The urgency is really to be able to return to the field and start logging to try to recover the wood before it deteriorates, explains Emmanuel de Montbron. There is also the whole sanitary aspect because in this kind of situation, the insects attack the wood. We are in a race against the clock. We really need to manage to exploit these forests before the arrival of humidity with autumn and winter.”