“The controls will not stop since the weather forecasts maintain a tension on the water resource”, explains Loïc Obled, deputy director general “Police, knowledge, expertise” at the French Office for Biodiversity, this Tuesday on franceinfo. No more department of the Hexagon is spared by the drought whereas the prefecture of Ile-de-France will place, Tuesday August 2, Paris and the small crown under “vigilance”.
Individuals, companies and communities are therefore invited to limit their water consumption. Loïc Obled specifies that thousands of checks on compliance with water restriction measures have been carried out since May. “We have already imposed fines since the beginning of the summer. There have been around 4,000 checks and around 400 procedures”In progress.
franceinfo: How many checks are you doing at the moment with your teams and is this number increasing with the drought of recent weeks?
Loic Obled: There are indeed a lot of controls at the moment and we are doing more and more of them. We carried out around 500 checks in May, 2,000 checks last week and we have dedicated the week that has just passed to a major national operation of education and checks. We have doubled this figure since we now have 4,000 checks throughout the national territory.
It is the whole of the national territory which is concerned by the drought decrees or almost the whole of the national territory. It’s a first. The controls are obviously not going to stop since the weather forecasts maintain a tension on the water resource that we must preserve.
How do you control?
Our colleagues, who are about fifteen per department, cannot control everything. The first thing is that each department is different. So there is a different control strategy. We try to prioritize according to the issues. This can be water for domestic use, for collective use, for industrial use or for agricultural irrigation. As a rule, these are things that are quite easily seen.
Our colleagues favor at the moment, and even more in this period of pronounced drought, pedagogy. We try to announce controls, to be visible on the ground. When we see that there is an infraction, in agreement with the prosecution, we can either do education or, when people are a little more recalcitrant, proceed to a verbalization.
Have you already imposed fines this summer? How high are they?
Yes we have already imposed fines since the beginning of the summer. There were about 4,000 checks and about 400 procedures ranging from recalling the law to the fifth class fine which goes up to 1,500 euros for the first time and 3,000 euros in case of recurrence. And for a legal person, so a company, a farm for example, it can go up to more than 7,000 euros.