Paris.- A total of 402 people have been arrested in France in connection with the fires that have broken out so far this season and which have burned a record area of 120,000 hectares, French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez noted this Tuesday.
In a media appearance from his department’s crisis center, Nuñez specified that 156 of those arrested are minors.
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Since the beginning of the campaign, 14,540 fires have been recorded, which have burned 120,000 hectares, the minister noted.
It is a figure that far exceeds those that have occurred in full years in more than half a century. The peak of the historical series was represented by 1976, with nearly 90,000 hectares of forest burned. In more recent dates, a black year was 2022, with 72,000 hectares destroyed by fire.
This year, the mega-fire in the Gironde department (southwest) burned 42,000 hectares in the Arcachon Bay and up to the outskirts of Bordeaux at the end of July.
Although “the situation is improving”, “we remain evidently vigilant, since weather conditions continue to be favorable for fires to break out”, said the head of the Interior Ministry.
Meteorological services had placed 16 of the country’s hundred departments on orange alert for heat this Tuesday, especially in the southeast of the country, on the Mediterranean coast and in the Rhône basin. On Wednesday, the number of departments with that heat risk (the second highest) is reduced to 13 in that same area.
The main active fire this Tuesday remained that of the Gros Bessillon massif in the Var department, about fifty kilometers north of the Mediterranean port of Toulon, which began on July 21 and which, after burning 4,500 hectares in ten days, reactivated last Friday.
Since then, it has devastated another 1,850 hectares in a Mediterranean forest area, and about 1,000 firefighters were working on its extinction this Tuesday, supported from the air by two Canadair-type seaplanes and water-bombing helicopters.
