Fires. “Anger is brewing”: firefighters, on strike this Thursday, received by Laurent Nuñez

They speak of “generalized fed up”. The nine unions representing the fire and rescue services (Sdis) filed a national strike notice this Thursday.

The inter-union have been received since midday at Place Beauvau by the Minister of the Interior, to whom they intend to report the anger and exhaustion of the firefighters, who are asking for more resources and men in the middle of the fire season. They were received there by Laurent Nuñez “in the context of the fight against forest fires”, according to the minister’s entourage.

“Clear commitments”

In a joint press release, the firefighters’ union denounces the “continuous deterioration of the conditions for carrying out civil security missions”, which results in “insufficient staff”, “lagging resources”, or even “aging equipment”.

France has some 44,000 professional civilian firefighters, plus 200,000 volunteers in the Sdis and just over 13,000 soldiers in Paris and Marseille. “Anger is brewing” among professional firefighters, whose “personnel are at the end of their tether,” add the unions, who have planned a press conference at the end of the meeting.

“We are waiting for clear commitments. We’ve been being dragged around for years,” warns David Saquet, from Unsa Firefighters. The union leader refers to the “Beauvau of civil security”, a twelve-month consultation launched in mid-2024 which was to result in an ambitious law to modernize a system considered to be running out of steam, with additional funding at stake, but which has remained a dead letter for the moment.

“We’re going straight into the wall”

“We don’t want to be called heroes, we want to be given the means,” explains Ludovic Goblet, vice-president of the Spasdis-CFTC. In unison, the unions demand that “the State opens the tap” of financing, currently assumed by the communities, and that it launches a “massive recruitment of professional firefighters”.

“The forest fires this summer, which were of an exceptional scale but which will become the norm, have shown that we are heading straight into the wall,” judges Ludovic Goblet. Some 120,000 hectares have been covered by flames in France since the start of summer, according to provisional estimates from the authorities.

“There was a Beauvau of civil security, conclusions must be drawn from it. But (…) there are also a lot of resources that have been put on the table in recent years, in particular the last three, where we have simply doubled the number of aerial devices available to firefighters,” Jean-Didier Berger, Minister Delegate to the Minister of the Interior, argued on Tuesday.

“It is because we have this level of support, this level of resources, that we are able to put out fires much more quickly than in other comparable European countries,” he added. Statements coldly received by the unions before being received in Beauvau.