Stéphane Place, edited by Romain Rouillard 8:00 p.m., July 25, 2022
While 21,000 hectares of forest have gone up in smoke in Landiras and La Test-de-Buch, the fires are now fixed.
But the firefighters insist on vigilance, which must still prevail, especially since the flames are not always extinguished.
Several forest sectors are still under close surveillance.
In Gironde, firefighters have not yet quite finished with forest fires.
If the fires are fixed, it does not mean that all the flames are extinguished.
Therefore, it is out of the question to relax vigilance, as Marc Vermeulen, the fire chief of Gironde, explains at the microphone of Europe 1. “To give an idea, the surfaces to be monitored on the Landiras fire correspond to 48,000 rugby pitches. So we divided the areas into sub-sectors, assigned day and night staff", he explains.
131 firefighters in La Test-de-Buch, 320 in Landiras
Those at night carry out rounds to "identify and treat all the recoveries, all the fumaroles which could appear".
These sub-sectors are eight in number in Landiras and three in La Teste-de-Buch.
They are accompanied by several machines that patrol the area.
"In the La Teste area, we have 131 firefighters present and in the Landiras area, 320 firefighters who come from both extra-departmental reinforcement columns that we have kept, but also and mainly from the firefighters of the Gironde", adds Marc Vermeulen.
The department's fire chief insists on the "non-standard" nature of these fires.
"Already, when we made fires of a few hundred hectares, it took weeks or months. So you can imagine, on this scale, the titanic work that awaits us in collaboration with forest professionals and in particular the DFCI (defense of the French forest against fires Editor's note)".