Fire service in France

The fire service in France is known as Sapeurs-pompiers, except in Marseille, where naval "sailor-firefighters", marins-pompiers, provide fire and rescue services.

There are two categories:

• The Paris Fire Brigade (Army) and Marseille Marine Fire Battalion (Navy) are military units providing fire protection to Paris and Marseille.
• The rest of France has civilian fire services organized, supervised and trained by the French Ministry of the Interior; specifically, they fall under the Civil Defence and Security Directorate (Direction des défense et sécurité civiles, DDSC).

There are approximately 250,584 fire service personnel in France operating 15,000 emergency vehicles out of 10,238 emergency centres.

Pompier (firefighter) etymologically comes from the concept of pumping (water) and refers to the manual pumps that were originally used. Sapeur means "sapper" and refers to the first official firefighting unit created by Napoleon I which was part of the military engineering arm.

Categories

As of 1 January 2009, there werere 249 400 sapeurs-pompier in France:

• 39,200 professionals at 16%
• 197,800 sapeurs-pompiers voluntaris at 79 %
• 12,100 militaires at 5%

Women comprised 12% of the civil sapeurs-pompiers.

The service de santé and of effectives.

The administrative personnel, technicians and specialists numbered 10...
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