Пожарная служба во Франции: организация и структура

The fire service in France is organised into local fire services which mostly cover the Departments of France, with a few exceptions. There are two types of fire service:
The Paris Fire Brigade (Army) and Marseille Naval 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 Générale de la Sécurité Civile et de la Gestion de Crise, DGSCGC). There are approximately 246,900 fire service personnel in France operating 15,642 emergency vehicles out of 6,894 emergency centres. In French, firefighters are known as sapeurs pompiers or informally as pompiers. The former originally refers to the military based Paris Fire Brigade. Pompier (pumper) comes from the word for "pump", referring to the manual pumps originally used for firefighting. Sapeur means "sapper" and refers to the first official firefighting unit created by Napoleon I which was part of the military engineering arm. Firefighters in the Marseille Marine Fire Battalion are known as marins pompiers (sailor firefighters). The usual name of a civilian fire services is a service départemental d'incendie et de secours (SDIS) (Departmental Fire and Rescue Service). Young French citizens can fulfill the mandatory service Service national universel (SNU) in one of the fire brigades.

The fire service is organized based on the various Departments. Each department has a Service Departmentaux d'Incendie et de Secours (SDIS, Departmental Fire and Rescue Service) responsible for operations within its territory, with a few exceptions:
Paris and the three departments of the petite couronne (Hauts de Seine, Seine Saint Denis and Val de Marne) are covered by the Paris Fire Brigade. Bouches du Rhône is covered by both the Marseille Naval Fire Battalion and a civilian Bouches du Rhône SDIS. Lyon Metropolis and Rhône are both covered by the Rhône SDIS, reflecting Rhône's boundaries before 2015. Corsica is divided between two fire services, reflecting the departments that existed from 1975 to 2017.

Local fire departments also respond to medical calls, and can send an ambulance, a multi purpose response vehicle or even a fire apparatus. Here, the cross trained firefighters will provide on scene care and transport for injuries or illness, but are usually backed up by a SMUR unit for more serious or complex cases. Firefighters are trained to provide basic life support (BLS) level care. Although they also transport casualties and are, in any practical sense, ambulances, their vehicles are instead called a VSAV (véhicule de secours et d'assistance aux victimes – rescue and casualty assistance vehicle). Volunteer staffed ambulances may be called a VPS (véhicules de premiers secours – first aid vehicle). The VSAV and VPS are considered to be means of bringing rescue workers and equipment onsite, with the evacuation of patients being only the logical result of the response, but not the primary duty of these response resources.