In the face of the flames, the France grows stronger. After the announcements of the European Commission on Thursday on the European mutual aid mechanism, Emmanuel Macron in turn presented this Friday, in Garons in the Gard, additional means for this summer in the face of the risk of fire.
The head of state announced that nine additional aircraft would be made available to the firefighters. The number of available devices therefore increases from 38 in 2022 to 47 in 2023. "They are already fully mobilizable," Macron said. An advanced coordination centre will also be set up in Nîmes.
3660 firefighters in reinforcement
The France will also have 51 columns of national reinforcements "which can be distributed throughout the country according to needs", against 44 last year, as announced this Thursday by Bruno Ulliac, Comptroller General of Firefighters and Head of the Mission of European and International Relations at the Ministry of the Interior. "It was 20 in 2021," recalls Emmanuel Macron. In all, 3660 firefighters will be able to support the local personnel who need it. Some resources will be prepositioned in the south of France, and in particular in the southwestern zone, hard hit in 2022 by the mega forest fires of Gironde. More specifically, they will be pre-positioned in Bordeaux.
The France – under the European Solidarity Mechanism and its rescEU 'capacity pool' – will also pre-position 174 firefighters from Austria, Poland, Romania and Slovenia. In contrast, Paris will send 20 firefighters to Greece, where 205 European firefighters will be deployed.
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The year 2023 promises to be "very worrying" in France in the face of fires, observed Thursday Claire Kowalewski, national expert seconded to the European Commission, at a press briefing. "The year 2023 is well above the averages of recent years, whether in terms of burned area or number of forest fires," she said.
In addition to all these technical means, the France now has a forest weather, launched on June 1st. This makes it possible to raise public awareness of the risk of fire. Firefighters will also have more accurate data in 35 departments. The first was broadcast Thursday evening in advance by TF1: it shows a France all green (low risk), with the exception of a few departments in yellow (moderate risk) mainly grouped southwest of Paris (Eure-et-Loir, Sarthe, Mayenne ...).