Wildfires in Provence: locals blame climate change and arson | World news

Wildfires in Provence: locals blame climate change and arson | World news

A sickly sweet smell hangs in the air on the road that zigzags up to the medieval village of Carros, a route that was once lushly forested but now lies in ashes in the wake of wildfires that have devastated swathes of Provence’s countryside.

Among those venturing here on Friday to gaze at the apocalyptic vista of blackened trees were Lennard and Sofie Nystedt, a Swedish couple who were among around 10,000 holidaymakers and locals who were forced to flee to the safety of public shelters and hotels overnight on Tuesday as flames swept down hillsides.

“We were in Antibes earlier in the day but when we went back in the afternoon there was smoke around our house, so we were evacuated,” she said, as their children lingered behind nearby barriers preventing traffic from using the road inland from Nice.

“Our daughter was very frightened. I think it’s something that we are going to remember for the rest of our lives.”

With the fires now largely extinguished â€" albeit against the backdrop of dry conditions and clouds of black smoke that still hung over parts of the skyline around some of the worst-affected areas â€" minds have turned to the causes, and how life may change forever.

“There was a ‘before’, and now there will be an ‘after’,” said the Carros mayor, Charles Scibetta, who told of how residents awoke earlier in the week to a “lunar landscape” around them and promised increased vigilance as well as a tougher approach towards the negligence that heightens fire risks.

But there’s also a sense that bigger factors are in play, with many locals quick to cite global warming and a feeling that traditional weather patterns have been ruptured.

“It has been changing. It’s almost as if we have just two seasons â€" winter and summer. One week you can be in your coat but the next you can be in a light shirt,” said Scibetta.

At the same time, a cornucopia of other reasons and suspected culprits have been cited â€" many have even been viewing the fires through the prism of France’s recent terrorist traumas. Quick to capitalise on this, senior members of the regionally strong Front National have described the blazes as “a form of terrorism”.

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It’s a view quietly articulated by some in the old village of Carros, which lies above a larger “newer” town, and 20km inland from Nice where 86 people died just over a year ago after a lorry drove in to crowds celebrating Bastille Day on the seafront Promenade des Anglais.

“It’s true that some people blame the fires on terrorism and they write it on Facebook,” said Mia Rose, a Danish-born resident of the village, as she walked her collie through its sleepy cobblestoned lanes. Nodding towards the new town, built in the 1970s to accommodate workers as one of Provence’s largest industrial zones took shape beside it, she added: “We have a lot of Muslims in town down there, and I have seen some people writing that. But I don’t know, here in the village it’s very different.”

Terrorism is not a line of inquiry that has been voiced by authorities investigating the fires though. Indeed, Carros’s town hall officials praise the community’s sense of solidarity and the offers of assistance to help those made homeless in the blazes.

Nevertheless, the possibility that criminal motives were behind the fires is a real one. Two 16-year-old boys who were stopped by police remain in custody on suspicion of deliberately starting the Carros fires.

Elsewhere, arrests have taken place in relation to other fires including in Peynier, near Aix-en-Provence, where a man was charged on Friday night, while Renaud Muselier, president of the Provence regional council, said that many of the blazes are “of criminal origin” and the “activity of arsonists”.

Such arson is not a new thing. Sitting with friends in square in Carros â€" a village that has traditionally been spared tourists scrums but which was quieter than usual â€"Malika Merzouk, a local resident, explained some of the motives cited in the past for forest arson.

“Some people might set the fires to clear new land to build for example, while others might be trying to bring the price of property down. But either way, it’s criminal and very dangerous,” she added.

Throwing another theory into the mix, meanwhile, her friend Stephan Van der Stuyft suggested that the fires could be caused by wolves that have reappeared in the region after crossing over from Italy. After being hunted to extinction France in the 1930s, they now number in the hundreds and have been blamed for driving farmers and their sheep off pastures that then become fire-prone shrubland.

“It might be nonsense, but a lot of people seem to be taking it seriously as an idea,” he added. “Still, if you talk to a fireman here they will just tell you that there is no real reason for what has happened. Everything is so dry that sometimes even the spark from a car exhaust can cause something.”

It has been an exhausting week for those firefighters, backed by troops, civil security officials and the pilots of 19 specially equipped planes that have been dropping containers of water on flaming inland trees and bushes.

Some of the most widely shared footage on social media in recent days has been taken on the beaches of Nice by tourists watching three Canadair CL-415 Superscooper aircraft flying into the sea to pick up water, before embarking on the hazardous job of going low again over fire zones.

France’s strategy of quickly suppressing fires with huge resources is being questioned. Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images

Yet while the emergency response has largely been successful, the strategy of quickly and aggressively suppressing fires with huge and concentrated resources â€" an approach established in France in response to the devastating wildfires of the 1990s â€" is being questioned.

An academic study published this month for the international Society for Risk Analysis by two French experts on biodiversity and forest fire management suggests that official policy places too little emphasis on prevention in the first place, while bans on fire use for agricultural purposes have led to the disappearance of a “fire-wise” culture among communities.

The authors Thibaut Fréjaville and Thomas Curt argue that the suppression policy itself may even have resulted in the build-up of biomass that increases the hazard of massive fires and lengthens the wildfire “season”.

Strongly questioning the sustainability of the fire policy pursued by France and other Mediterranean countries, the authors warn that the approach could be the origin of a new generation of wildfires that will prove even more intense and difficult to suppress.

Back in Carros, there is optimism that moves to plant new trees and repair forest beds can produce tangible results within 10 years.

“It has been one of our green lungs and so has been extremely important to us,” said the mayor, Scibetta. “We do have other forests but it is still sad to see it being destroyed like this.”

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