The fire in a slum of Sarcelles (Val-d’Oise) did not cause any casualties and it is a chance, given the late hour at which it declared itself. The alert was given around one o’clock in the morning, on the night of Wednesday to Thursday.
Significant resources were immediately dispatched to the site to prevent the fire from spreading to the entire camp set up under the high-voltage lines. A slum located on avenue de la Division-Leclerc, near the cinema and its car parks, which includes real small fields of cultivation at the back.
7 hours of firefighter intervention
The Val-d’Oise firefighters deployed four fire hoses as well as a fifth high-powered one. The fire was ultimately able to be limited to 300 square meters of the camp, the rest having been preserved. A total of 32 firefighters having deployed 9 devices on site, were mobilized during this intervention which lasted 7 hours.
They also had to call in the animal risk team to control two dangerous dogs that were wandering around the camp during the operation. On the other hand, RTE, the manager of the electricity transmission network, cut off the current in the 225,000 volt line which overlooks the land. A cut that had no impact on users of the sector. Only two people involved in the fire were taken care of by the emergency services and were not hospitalized.
“They will be relocated” confides the mayor (PS) of Sarcelles, Patrick Haddad. “About fifteen people, in a very precarious situation, live in this shantytown where two barracks were destroyed. It’s a small slum that’s been there for a long time, maybe ten years. It has been stable for a few years in terms of population, although this has fluctuated over time”.
The mayor of Sarcelles also specifies that the residents of the slum do not pose any particular problems for the municipality. “For the future, he adds, we plan to buy the land and build a new district on this plot which has never been urbanized, which has been abandoned”, concludes the elected official.
