Originally a comment by Athel Cornish-Bowen on What was your first clue?
The only thing they’ve talked about on the news for the past two or three days has been the fires in the region of Bordeaux. They’ve kept everything else a secret, so if Trump has been assassinated I’ve haven’t been told. It has been understood for decades that if you don’t want forest fires you should clear the undergrowth regularly before it dries out, and you shouldn’t plant endless rows of identical trees, and emphatically not pines. So what do they do? They don’t enforce the laws about clearing the undergrowth, and they plant endless rows of pines of uniform size. Unfortunately, what we learn from experience is that we don’t learn from experience.
Fires close to Bordeaux are not partcularly frequent, but they do occur, and there was a very bad one in 2022. In the Var, much nearer to where I live, they are close to being an annual problem. Again, they don’t seem to be doing all they could to prevent them. Here in Marseilles we had a spell of heavy rain on Saturday, so we we should be safe for a while.
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