Cestas (France) (AFP)

Summer and drought, in the forest of the Landes de Gascogne, always revive the fire vigilance. And the memory of 1949, when a "tornado of fire" made 82 dead in Cestas (Gironde), the most deadly forest fire in France, which would generate, in the South-West, a prevention today exemplary.

"At 3:00 pm, it was dark like in the middle of the night, like clouds very, very low, but smoke ... In Bordeaux (30 km to the north), ashes fell back into the city, and on the road, people were fleeing foot, bike, car ... Like the exodus from the war ".

Christian Giraudeau still dreams of this August 20, 1949. He sees his two classmates, 14 years like him, who perished in the flames. Because at the time, when the tocsin of the church sounded, every valid man "went to the fire" with the means of the edge. Buckets, shovels, cisterns on horseback, and especially heads of young cut pines, to beat the flames, to smother them. And some GMC trucks left by the GIs.

- "Everyone saved his skin" -

"It was a tornado, the fire took everywhere, there was a strong wind, everyone scattered," recalls Christian, his eyes fixed in reliving his one-kilometer sprint on the forest track. "I can see myself near the road, I had maybe 50 meters left, I did not think I could get there because there were trees that were tearing up in flames, smoke ... Fortunately at the time, I was doing cross, I had been champion of Gironde in school ".

"We did not expect each other, everyone saved their skin ... It was a real wall of fire, the flames rose above the pines (about 30 m, Ed.) We can not describe, was apocalyptic! "recalls Henri Laffargue, 92 years old. When he took his bike to save what he could at home, 3 km away, the fire was already there. "It had to be 15 km / h, well, some said!"

What happened? A "lethal cocktail", with a sudden change of wind at 180 degrees, a vegetation ready to ignite by two years of exceptional drought? Several fires coming together? Counterfeiters wrongly? A bit of all that.

The fire of 1949, analyzed the commander Sebastien Castel, of the Departmental Service of fire and rescue (SDIS) of Gironde and history buff, "has been attested as one of the first cases + flashover generalized lightning + open sky" , a phenomenon that usually occurs in confined space.

- "A combustion like an explosion" -

This is the "flash over", explains the officer: "the fumes reach their temperature of auto-ignition, and all the smoke, pockets of vegetable essence, ignite at once, and the people are caught + by fire, it is a combustion that is like an explosion, so it spreads fast ". Witnesses also claimed to have heard an explosion.

"It was a dante vision," wrote the then deputy mayor of Cestas, Henri Verdery, "fire was taking in thousands of homes at a time, 1,000 or 1,500 meters from the fire" because of projected sparks, swings of fire. "Ribbons of fire rose to 100 m in height". Barns, in the middle of the meadows, were ignited by thermal radiation or projections.

Cestas lost on that day 16 inhabitants, his neighbor Canéjan, 29 - "almost one dead per house". And the conscripts of the 3rd Artillery Regiment of Châtellerault, pioupious without fire, hurriedly dispatched 25 men. In six days, some 52,000 hectares of forest went up in smoke.

Cruel irony, a specific body of firemen professional firefighters had been created (1947), motivated by a decade decade of droughts and wildfires. 1949 was to give a "spectacular acceleration" to prevention, making the largest cultivated forest in Europe (nearly 1 M ha) one of the best maintained (42,000 km of tracks, 5,000 water points) and more secure, despite a record of fire starts: about 1,500 per year, for just 1,800 ha burned.

© 2019 AFP