“When you have a wall of fire that arrives at 8 km / h, it’s totally unreal”confides Marc-Étienne Lansade, the mayor of Cogolin, in the Var, which experienced very serious fires in particular in 2021 with 8,000 hectares gone up in smoke and especially in 2003, when 20,000 hectares had burned in the Massif des Maures.
franceinfo: What are you doing to avoid disasters like those of 2003 or last year?
Marc-Etienne Lansade: Our environmental police go around all the properties that are subject to the obligation to clear brush. But I would tend to tell you that this year, after the trauma of last year, of course, people are perfectly aware of this necessity. I’m not hiding from you that it’s rather in the years to come that memory, unfortunately, will fail and that we won’t remember these catastrophic events, and that’s why we’re trying to ensure that does not happen again in the future by taking deeper measures.
We are in the process of revising the local urban plan, and we have planned a barrier of vines of a hundred meters which will encircle the town in order to provide safety for the inhabitants. Obviously, that won’t stop the damage that there may be in the forests and all the disasters that go with it, but at least it will be able to shelter the populations inside the vines, because the vine, it’s is very low vegetation that can stop the flames depending on the circumstances.
What are the elements that most aggravate fires, which lead to disasters such as the ones you have experienced?
Drought and wind. With the wind, in 2003, the fire took two days when last year it took 5 hours. We saw a fire at an absolutely exceptional speed. When you have a wall of fire coming at 8km/h, it’s totally unreal. But the advantage, in quotes, of this nature is that it does less profound damage.
Do you know the origin of these fires?
Each time, it is from a motorway service area that our fires start. There is therefore work to be done to really control or limit access to these motorway areas, and above all to clear brush around them, since the people who are there are sometimes totally unaware of the consequences of their actions. There are risky behaviors, you have people smoking cigarettes by hand outside the car, we see wicks leaving. But people don’t realize that a fire starts very quickly. We have seen this many times.