A historic wildfire that burned 42,000 hectares in the Gironde department has left its firefighters facing serious psychological risks, and the mental health unit supporting them is overwhelmed with demand.
Laurence Auvert, who heads the psychological support mission at the Gironde departmental fire and rescue service, said requests for help had surged from two or three a week to three an hour since the fire began. In nearly 20 years of practice, she said she had never experienced such intensity of work.
A small team under pressure
The on-call telephone service, which already operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week, has been running at full capacity throughout the crisis. Two territorial psychologists, working in relay and backed by three volunteer firefighter psychologists and around a dozen specialized nurses, are responsible for supporting roughly 5,000 Sdis agents, along with reinforcements from other departments who joined the effort.
The team intervenes across the territory whenever a crew has faced imminent danger, and provides longer-term follow-up for firefighters showing signs of mental injury.
Fear for their lives
Since the start of the firefighting operation, the unit has been called out to several emergencies: smoke intoxications, a truck trapped while racing toward the fire, and road accidents caused by accumulated fatigue. Auvert said the firefighters had feared for their own lives or those of their colleagues, with the feeling of having no way out.
She described these as events carrying a traumatic risk, made harder by the fact that Gironde firefighters had lost two colleagues in a separate fire in Merignac the day before the Saumos blaze began. When a period of grief is already underway, she said, the perception of threat and danger becomes sharper, more intense, and triggers greater anxiety, leaving people more vulnerable.
In response, a psychological stabilization zone was set up at the Merignac barracks, and psychologists from other fire services in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, including Charente, arrived to help.
Talking about fear
When psychologists reach a fire station, day or night, their first task is to explain to affected personnel that they have experienced an unusual, possibly brutal and dangerous event that can have psychological consequences in the days and weeks ahead. Auvert compared it to assessing the state of the body after a physical injury.
She said the sessions also remind firefighters that fear is entirely normal, describing it as a signal on a dashboard. Courage, she said, is not the absence of fear but the ability to work with it.
The long road ahead
Once the immediate crisis is over, a longer phase of work will begin. Auvert said that once the battle is finished, firefighters will be much more in contact with what they felt. The aim will be to help them carry out a process of psychological assimilation, to move past any sense of failure, guilt, or anger. Some may also be affected by eco-anxiety, as frontline witnesses to climate change and the growing risk of fires of this scale.
Auvert said firefighters should treat the first month after the fire as a vulnerability window. If sleep remains poor after that period, if they still feel very irritable or do not feel they are functioning as before, she said, they should see a specialist.
She warned in particular against delayed disorders. Even after a fire ends, stress levels may not fall for some people, who can go on to develop adjustment disorders, latent anxiety, or post-traumatic stress that sometimes surfaces years later. Left untreated, she said, those traumas can be reactivated by a new fire. Time alone, she said, does nothing.
After the large fires of summer 2022, her team had already supported several firefighters with serious mental injuries. In total, she said, between 10 and 15 percent of personnel had experienced what she called operational mental injuries. But the majority had continued to move forward, which she said gave her hope for the weeks and months ahead. Her team, she added, would remain on call for as long as necessary.
