More than 700 firefighters continued to tackle the remaining fire on the French Riviera yesterday as the police scored an early success in their hunt for the arsonists suspected of having started the blazes.
A council worker from a village near Draguignan is to be questioned by an examining magistrate on suspicion of being responsible for some of the fires set on Sunday.
About 10 000 hectares of woodland and several dozen houses have been destroyed in the past two days by the fires, which have smothered much of the Maures massif in billowing smoke and flame and prompted the panicked evacuation of 20 000 residents and holidaymakers.
Although most of the 30 distinct fires between the resorts of Sainte-Maxime and Fréjus have been extinguished or brought under control, a fire brigade spokesperson said one big blaze at La Motte, near Draguignan, was still burning fiercely and might not be contained until this morning.
Exhausted firefighters, who are being backed by fire-fighting planes and reinforcements from Italy, openly wondered yesterday how they were going to survive the summer.
”There’s still a full month to go,” René Dies, a fire officer, said. ”We’ve had 550 red alerts in the past two days, against a maximum of about 350 in an entire normal summer. We’ll collapse completely if it continues like this.”
This week’s fires on the Côte d’Azur and in Corsica have killed five people, including two British tourists.
As most of southern Europe suffers one of the worst droughts for decades, a man of 60 died in a fire near Fundao, north-east of the Portuguese capital Lisbon, yesterday.
Fires destroy tens of thousands of hectares of southern French woodland each summer: up to 90 000 in the worst recent years, 1989 and 1990.
They are often started by stray cigarette ends or barbecues, but children playing with matches, vengeful neighbours, farmers after insurance money and ”pathological” pyromaniacs are also to blame.
The police say that about 70% are caused by carelessness and a further 20% by arsonists.
Responding to the shock and and revulsion at the scale of the disaster, the justice minister, Dominique Perben, has asked judges to pass the maximum sentences: 30 years for lighting a fire deliberately, five for criminal negligence.
”Genuine pyromania, which is a medical condition, is rare,” said Marc Peyron, a psychologist. ”More often people who light fires do it out of depression, from unemployment for example, or because of family problems or some generalised sense of persecution.
”It’s very hard to come up with a catch-all profile, which makes it almost impossible to identify them as a potential risk beforehand.”
But the police and fire brigades have noticed a growing tendency towards organised gangs of criminal arsonists who start fires simply for the hell of it.
Last summer a firefighter in the Pyrenees was knocked unconscious by a group of youths who then re-lit the fire he had just extinguished.
Such a gang may have started the Riviera fires, gendarmes say, since the remains of several Molotov cocktails have been found: they were being analysed yesterday.
The exceptionally rapid advance of this summer’s fires is due mainly to the tinder-dry state of undergrowth starved of rain for nearly three months. But ecologists also blame the gradual replacement of native deciduous trees by imported pineswhich retain far less water and burn more easily. – Guardian Unlimited Â