Kim JANIEC
Published on
It’s a fairly unknown area to the people of Gard. However, it is located near a tourist area. Indeed, not far from l’Espiguette, on the commune of Grau-du-Roi (Gard), there is a site of hydrocarbons depot under NATO, classified Seveso.
As part of an exercise organized by state services and the National Interallied Oil Pipelines Service (SNOI), this Wednesday, April 1, 2026, an alarm may sound at this facility.
If you are in Grau-du-Roi or nearby, you may hear this unusual sound: it’s not an April Fool’s joke, nor a simple beginning-of-the-month test.
A rescue exercise
Do not panic. Even though the current geopolitical context is not always reassuring and can be anxiety-inducing, this alarm is just a simple rescue exercise. It is a test that will involve rescue vehicles as well as law enforcement and armed forces. It will be possible to see these teams heading towards the plant, but this will have nothing abnormal.
If you witness this scenario, the Gard prefecture requests the population to continue their activities normally, not to call emergency services and not to spread false information. It reminds that no particular action is expected from residents and that the exercise stops at the alert phase.
Not the first time
This is not the first time such an exercise has been conducted in Gard. Mid-December, a similar operation was carried out on the outskirts of Aigues-Vives, at the Syngenta company site, classified Seveso “High Threshold”. On that occasion, state services activated the FR-Alert system which sends out a sound notification to all phones in the area. It worked well despite a glitch, as the word “Exercise” was not included in the message.
At the end of November, an exercise was also conducted within the Distagri company in Saint-Gilles, also with an alert sent and deployment of significant rescue resources. Early October, it was the bullring in Aimargues that was the center of a full-scale civil security exercise with the deployment of firefighters and rescue teams from SAMU and SMUR.
