fires caused by the threshing of the harvesters propagate in the dry fields. Everything is done to save harvests.
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Oise is on the alert. Since June 15, firefighters have been counting fifteen fire starts in wheat fields from the department. In the middle of a harvest period, they have already ravaged a hundred hectares. The most serious has devastated forty to Bouillancy. On the only day of Saturday July 9, firefighters intervened three times on harvest fires.
Farmers and authorities all have in memory in a scorching summer of 2019, when they understood that these fires would no longer be the prerogative of the Mediterranean departments; “600 hectares destroyed north of Beauvais and a farmer is dead,” recalls Linda Monnier, director of the Departmental Federation of Farmers’ Unions (FDSEA). The prefecture had then taken a decree stopping the harvests for forty-eight hours and prohibiting beating the wheat.
The Hauts-de-France region, hitherto spared, is now, with the Pays de la Loire, Center-Val de Loire and Brittany, in the list of the Ministry of Ecological Transition identifying the newly Exposed.
In 2019, 3,000 hectares of agricultural land left for smoke. After this episode, the Directorate General for Civil Security and Crisis Management considered that “our air forces [fire fighting] must be distributed throughout the territory”. Three sites that can accommodate water bombers have been opened “to interact in less than thirty minutes” on the northern perimeter, specifies the staff. The closest to the Oise is in Meaulte, in the Somme.
“flint effect”
This period of harvest is at high risk with vegetation completely dried up by the heat and the lack of water, which ignite in no time. In recent days, the passage of combine harvesters in the fields have caused extremely rapid and difficult to control fire departures that firefighters have arrived. It only takes straw residues and a skate that strikes a pebble to cause a “flint effect”: a simple spark and the fire spreads.
Ballots presses and grinders are also dangerous: “As soon as there are machines, oil, bearings and dust, the risks are there”, specifies Linda Monnier.
The prefecture of Oise, where a crisis meeting was held on Monday with the departmental intervention and rescue service (SDIS) and representatives of the agricultural sector, did not suspend the harvests but Emitted “recommendations”: harvesting in the morning and evening, even at night, implementing means of first intervention to circumscribe the starts of fire and provide fire extinguishers and delighters near agricultural machinery. The outskirts make it possible to mix the earth with the remains of cereal stem, to spade it and to “cut the fire”.
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