France This Way...the blog!!

In Provence there are restrictions on access to substantial parts of the countryside during the summer months because of the fire risk, and nowhere more so than in the forested regions around Marseille.

The tourist offices in the region hand out leaflets offering good advice – such as ‘don’t park your car in long dry grass’, and ‘anyone caught smoking in a restricted zone will be publicly guillotined’.

Despite the precautions, about 15,000 hectares (35,000 acres) of forest gets destroyed each year by one of the 3,000 fires in the region! (Note: if you are a heavy smoker planning to camp out in Provence next week read some advice about avoiding forest fires before you get the barbecue out.)

There are often suggestions that the fires are started by firemen looking for a bit of action, and there have been a couple of widely publicised cases where this was the case, but usually they are because a happy camper thinks a campfire or barbecue is a good idea in a tinder-dry forest.

Someone once told me that it is almost impossible to start a forest fire simply by throwing a cigarette butt from a car window but I don’t know how true that is, and don’t recommend you try it out yourself.

So the mystery is, what made the army think it was sensible to carry out a bit of training near Marseille yesterday, which resulted in a great fire destroying 1,200 hectares of forest, threatening eastern suburbs of the city, and forcing the evacuation of various old people’s homes? Even more startling, they did the same thing last year when they started the biggest fire in the region!

I’m sure it’s more fun having army training on the coast around Cassis in the summer than waiting for winter and heading for the damp forests of north-east France, but you’d think they’d use a bit of common-sense.

Imagine the reaction if I had recklessly started an enormous fire last year, then gone back and done the same thing again this year. I don’t know the legal penalty for pyromania but presumably I’d be sharing a prison cell with a big bloke covered in tattoos and peering at the sky through the bars of my cell window…I wonder if that’s what will happen to the army chief concerned?