For the Sarthe fire service, fires and forest fires are “a daily occurrence”. As soon as temperatures soar with the return of summer, forest fires, brush fires and crop fires become more frequent. With 117,000 hectares of woodland, covering nearly 20 per cent of the department’s total area, the department is the most heavily forested in the Pays de la Loire region. In 2019, 210 hectares of vegetation went up in smoke.
Our department is increasingly under threat from wildfires, which are occurring against a clear backdrop of global warming. “We must take action,” warned the president of the departmental council, Dominique Le Mèner, on Friday 17 July 2020, during a press briefing in the Bercé Forest.
Monitoring the forests 24 hours a day from 16 vantage points
“Whilst prevention remains the best form of protection”, the Sarthe Departmental Fire and Rescue Service (SDIS), supported by the department and the Le Mans metropolitan area, has set itself an ambitious challenge: to monitor all of Sarthe’s forests 24 hours a day, all year round. How? Through an automated video detection and forest fire localisation network, operated from the Codis (Departmental Fire and Rescue Operations Centre) and the main Le Mans-Degré rescue centre, where an operator will constantly manage the deployment of resources.
By March 2021, smoke detectors and surveillance cameras will be installed at sixteen vantage points across the department. Seven water towers and nine pylons, stretching from Sillé-le-Guillaume to Luché-Pringé, have been selected to house these 360° cameras, which have a range of twenty kilometres.
“Technology is replacing the old watchtowers,” summarises Colonel Christophe Burbaud, commander of the Sarthe Fire Brigade. By superimposing real-time images onto reference photographs, it detects the outbreak of fires and tracks their progression. The aim is to detect and pinpoint them accurately in order to optimise our response.