The megafire raging in southwestern France is threatening a hub of the aerospace and defense industries, imperiling plants that produce some of the world’s most sophisticated technologies and work with dangerous materials.
Just six miles from the blaze advancing on the city of Bordeaux, workers have been evacuated from a site where chemical rocket fuel is packed into boosters for submarine-launched nuclear missiles, and another where workers dismantle and decontaminate those missiles after they are retired.
“All affected sites have been evacuated and all necessary measures have been taken to secure them,” said Gregor Waschinski, the head of media relations for ArianeGroup in an email. ArianeGroup, a French-German aerospace giant that operates the plants in the town of Saint-Médard-en-Jalles, builds Europe’s Ariane rockets and France’s nuclear missiles.
The company is “working in close cooperation with both local and national authorities,” he added.
But ArianeGroup and other defense contractors, as well as government officials, did not discuss whether hazardous or combustible materials had been removed from locations put at risk by the fires.
The region’s top civil servant, Prefect Sophie Brocas, said on Saturday that army engineers and construction company employees had helped create firebreaks “around a number of sensitive sites” by stripping areas of all vegetation. The French Defense Ministry announced on Saturday that it was deploying “experts and equipment” to “secure industrial sites” in the area, along with sending 1,500 soldiers to protect property and help with evacuations.
ArianeGroup has three sites in the area, in both Saint-Médard-en-Jalles, which bills itself as the “birthplace of the aerospace industry” and the nearby town of Le Haillan, where it builds rocket engines and assembles missile boosters. Those sites, together with both towns, have been evacuated.
Safran, a major French aerospace contractor best known for building commercial jet engines, has similarly closed four plants in the region, according to the company’s media director, Catherine Malek.
Other companies in the Bordeaux Aeropark, according to the city’s promotional literature, include Dassault Aviation, Airbus Atlantic and Thales.
Dassault, a major maker of military and civilian airplanes, assembles fighter jets and makes pyrotechnics for things like pilots’ ejector seats at plants in the towns of Mérignac and Martignas, both near Saint-Médard-en-Jalles.
In cooperation with national and regional authorities, “we have moved a number of sensitive items of equipment from our Martignas site and the Cestas logistics center to our Mérignac site and Air Base 106,” Dassault said in a statement.
All the precautions reassured Céline Lartigue, a social worker who fled her home in Saint-Médard-en-Jalles late Friday night, along with neighbors and friends. But, she said from her cot inside the Bordeaux exposition center where hundreds are now housed, “It’s presumptuous to say that Saint-Médard won’t burn; it’s thinking you’re stronger than nature.”
Giulia Imbert and Lauren Leatherby contributed reporting.