TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The signal to move comes suddenly — and within a minute or so the fire truck is full and speeding off into the distance, a cloud of orange dust swirling in its wake. "There's always a bit of adrenaline when you get the call," marine firefighter Julien says. "But we're trained; we're prepared."
Maitre Julien — whom DW can only identity by rank and first name — is part of Marseille-based battalion deployed to France's Gironde region to tackle a wildfire which prompted the largest evacuations in the country since World War II.
Some 264 firefighters were injured in the fight against the Gironde fire, four of whom lost their lives. In nearby towns, French flags still fly at half mast to mark the loss. "It's always on our mind," Lieutenant Damien, another marine firefighter, explains as his team members haul the firehose out behind him.
Big battles on little sleep
Letitia, a firefighter and medic, said she tries to ask how colleagues are feeling "without being too intrusive."
"It's the fatigue above all," she says when asked about the most common problem affecting her colleagues. "They're sleeping very little."
"Do you see all of that?" Maitre Julien asks, gesturing out the car window as he drives past rows of blackened trees and swathes of scorched earth at the roadside. "All of that's already burned. But you can see small peels of smoke here and there. We absolutely have to extinguish those so fires don't restart."
When Julien pulls up at another hotspot, the risk of flare-ups comes sharply into focus: The air smells burned and a cloud of white smoke fills the sky. Within about 20 minutes, the smoke turns thick and black, and the fire — previously under control — was visible burning bright again through the trees.
Here by the firefighters' side are improvised teams of local volunteers — farmers and tradesmen and women who took it upon themselves to use their tractors or vans or four-by-fours to transport water to firefighters on the front line, and often head into the blazes themselves without proper protective gear or training.
"We're here because we're needed. And because we want to help," Steven Page, one volunteer, told DW. Maitre Julien said they played a "primordial" role, saving firefighters "precious time" in the fight.
Winning a 'David and Goliath' fight, together
At times, firefighters said, this felt like a "David and Goliath" battle. But they came out on top. By Saturday, France's Interior Ministry declared the fire was no longer progressing. Most of the 220,000 evacuees were allowed to return home.
Elsewhere in Europe, the heat of battle is far from over: Wildfires have also been raging in Greece and Spain — other countries are likely to face fires in the coming months too.
That's keeping EU crisis management chief Hadja Lahbib busy. She visited Bordeaux on Thursday, meeting local officials in Ornano fire station's crisis room and learning how they felled trees and vegetation across 150 kilometers (93 miles) of land to create tactical firebreaks and prevent the flames from reaching the city.
Dotted around the green lines on the map representing firebreaks are different European flags: Germany, Slovakia, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Czechia, Switzerland, Turkey — some of the countries that sent firefighting aircraft, firefighting crews, and technical teams through the EU's crisis management mechanism.
More EU funds to fight climate-fueled fires?
"Climate change isn't knocking at our door. It's here," Lahbib told DW on Thursday. Last year, her team laid out an EU crisis preparedness plan designed to better anticipate and prevent wildfires and other disasters through EU cooperation. "For that we need the means," she said.
"We proposed a budget of €10.7 billion ($12.3 billion), which is an important amount of money, but at the same time, it pays back," she said. "It's better to prevent — to anticipate — then to recover. So I hope that member states will follow our proposal."
EU states pay into a communal seven-year budget for the bloc. Some national governments facing their own financial woes — including Germany — are skeptical about the EU Commission's bid to lock in its biggest-ever global budget.
Lessons for the future
Climate campaigners also accuse the EU of walking back on big green promises as the bloc pursues a red-tape-cutting agenda to better compete with the likes of China and the US.
"This isn't 'just nature.' Decades of burning coal, oil and gas are making wildfires more frequent and more destructive," Greenpeace wrote in a statement last week.
But Lahbib gave a cautious response when asked about allegations that EU states were dragging their feet on climate action. "This is not the moment for controversy and so on. This is a moment of solidarity," she said. "We will have the time to draw on the lessons learned."
In Brussels, where a small monitoring and decision team runs a bloc-wide crisis response center, unit chief Maria Zuber is already busy planning.
"We need to think of informing the population," she said. "We need to think of evacuation plans. We need to invest in early warning tools. So all this is something that we we are mapping. I think that is the main challenge — that we need to change our mindset."
Wildfire season far from over
Back in Gironde, Maitre Julien is all too aware of what's ahead. "We know we'll have more intense fires like this one more frequently," he said. Even this year's wildfire season isn't over yet — Julien and his team still have all of August and September to get through.
But for now, there's a moment of reprieve. At a hastily setup command center in Lège-Cap-Ferret, firefighters can get a meal and some rest before heading back home, or out on their next shift. There's little privacy — just rows of camp beds in a sports hall full of people. Outside, some firefighters prefer to lie on the ground in the shade of empty firetrucks.
"It's a little moment of cohesion," Maitre Julien explains as he sips coffee and jokes with volunteers. "We're not with our family, so we make this sort of temporary bubble to stay well. So that it's more like home."
Read: Greece Battles Wildfires, Including Near Athens
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