00:00All the national parks in the hills and mountains above Marseille closed this Thursday.
00:07This after that fire at the start of the week that reached the northern end of the city
00:11forced the closure of Marseille Airport for a day.
00:16Rescuers working through the night again to douse the remaining embers from a blaze that destroyed dozens of homes.
00:23It happened so quickly. We were evacuated. We didn't take anything.
00:32There's nothing left. Everything's dead.
00:36Well, for more, we're joined from Marseille by Richard Ashton, journalist and international features writers for the Times of London.
00:43And from Chicago by Brian Sandberg, who is a climate science historian.
00:49And he is going to be going to the University of Aix-Marseille in the fall.
00:55Welcome to both of you.
00:58Thank you. Thank you.
01:00Let me begin with you, Richard.
01:02The worst has passed this time.
01:05The whole nation was shocked to see parts of Marseille under lockdown with the windows, people telling them to close the windows.
01:14Not so much shocked because there are brush fires in the hills above Marseille, but shocked because it was happening in the first week of July.
01:25Sure. Very early for the usual wildfire season.
01:31And what's happened is the winter here in the south of France was pretty wet.
01:35There was lots of rain, which allowed the brush to grow and the grass to grow long.
01:40And then we had several weeks of heat waves and then we had wind, which picks up often here and can get up to high, high speeds.
01:50Firefighters talk about the trois temps, the 330s and high winds combined with high temperatures and low and high.
02:00Sorry, low humidity is exactly what came together in this instance.
02:06The interior minister of France, Bruno Rattail, was in Marseille and he had said that, yeah, we should be in for a long, hot summer in the south of France.
02:16So this may, as we're already seeing with several other fires breaking out this week, this may not be the end, far from it, of this summer of wildfires.
02:27And your piece for the Times of London includes the fact that the damage includes an area immortalized by the Impressionist painters.
02:39Yeah, that's right.
02:41I mean, what has been so shocking, of course, with, as you mentioned, with this fire is that it's come right to the gates of the city of Marseille.
02:50That seems to be happening, as we may touch on. More and more often, more cities are expanding into forest area and that's creating risks.
03:00And what that meant is an area called Lestac, which is a historic port on the north of Marseille,
03:23And as we've seen this week, those views have been dramatically altered.
03:29I mean, the hillside is blackened and it's really striking to go up there and see how close people are living to areas that are now completely destroyed.
03:39And, yeah, it's being seen as a warning in some senses, because as one resident of the house whose courtyard was completely destroyed said to me, it could have been so much worse.
03:55Brian Sandberg, your remit is the history of how climate has evolved in France.
04:03Let me let me ask you, as you prepare to pack your bags and head to over to where Richard is, what are your thoughts?
04:12Well, I actually just got back from Marseille pretty recently to the United States, and I was in Marseille when they had the heat wave there, la canicule.
04:21And so I know that Marseille experiences wildfires every summer.
04:26In fact, I saw the planes filling up their water tanks to fight another fire while I was there.
04:33So I think the comparisons between places like Marseille and areas like Northern California and Western Canada, many other regions of the world that have this combination of dense forestation,
04:47hillsides and mountains and hot air and drought, it's a formula for repeated disasters.
04:56And, of course, as a historian, I'm interested in human reactions, social reactions to situations and environmental changes.
05:05And so every time we talk about a natural disaster, we need to remember that there are natural factors at work, environmental factors at work,
05:13but there are also many human and societal factors that are creating the situations that we then have to cope with.
05:20The human factors, you're talking about the root causes.
05:24When you look at the events that have unfurled in Marseille, complaints about not enough fire hydrants.
05:32I know you've had extreme weather over the United States with those deadly floods recently in Texas.
05:38And there it was, well, the National Weather Service didn't give us enough warning.
05:42How much do you blame human error?
05:46Well, human error is definitely a factor in many disasters.
05:50And you really need some time to investigate the communications on the ground.
05:56And so you don't know immediately after a disaster how significantly human factors have played a role in any disaster, I think.
06:05My particular specialty as a historian is looking at how human societies responded to the last era of global cooling,
06:14which is a very interesting case known as the Little Ice Age in the 16th and 17th centuries.
06:19And in France and other parts of the world, human societies had to respond to climate change that they, of course,
06:27did not understand as being a global climate change going on.
06:33So I think that we can take some lessons from that in looking at how local, regional, and national governments
06:40look at climate change today and respond to disasters.
06:44And one lesson, I think, is to avoid thinking exclusively about causation.
06:50We can look at factors that contribute to disasters.
06:54And there doesn't have to be a smoking gun that one individual person or one individual institution made a mistake,
07:02and therefore they caused a disaster.
07:04But there can be a whole range of different factors, both environmental and human and societal,
07:12that are contributing to the worsening of many of these disasters.
07:17And when it comes to those Texas floods, how much of the conversation is about what you just described, the causation?
07:26There's definitely a political debate going on in the case of the Texas floods.
07:30And I'm actually from Austin, Texas, and grew up going to the Guadalupe River and inner tubing and kayaking and camping along it.
07:42So I'm very familiar with the area there.
07:44And I actually have two young cousins who rather dramatically escaped from camps there along the Guadalupe River in the last week.
07:53So thankfully, they're OK, but there are hundreds of people who are dead and missing and thousands of families that are really impacted by this disaster.
08:02So the political debate, I think, is something that needs to go on.
08:08I think there are some real questions about the National Weather Service in particular,
08:13and more broadly, the NOAA federal agency that oversees the National Weather Service.
08:20There have been layoffs by the Trump administration in both of those organizations.
08:26And the New York Times has reported, I think just last night or maybe this morning,
08:32that one of the key members of the National Weather Service, a meteorologist whose role in the Texas office was to engage with local officials in case of a disaster,
08:43had recently taken early retirement under pressure from the Trump administration.
08:47So that's New York Times reporting, and I'm not privy to any of the documentation of that.
08:54But I think it raises some real serious questions about particular human factors related to budget cuts
09:03and also anti-climate science positions of the Trump administration that may have contributed to this particular disaster.
09:13Richard Ashton, did you ever think covering weather would be covering politics?
09:20I guess that's the epoch that we've entered, isn't it?
09:23I mean, everything is politics, and weather encompasses everything.
09:27We've obviously seen horrific stories in the last few years in Turkey and Greece and Italy and elsewhere,
09:33and obviously in the United States.
09:35France, as the numbers show, is becoming closer to front and center of that story about wildfires and natural disasters.
09:45It's not going anywhere, as you might imagine.
09:50It's a political debate here, too.
09:52The mayor of Marseille has had a kicking from some critics here who said he was sort of condescending in his attitude, if you like,
10:02praising the citizens of Marseille for doing as they were told and staying in their houses,
10:07when in many cases actually what they possibly could have done was evacuated more quickly.
10:13And the conversation here has turned to a large extent to how prepared the fire services are,
10:23whether they've got enough fire hydrants and aeroplanes at the moment.
10:27Macron has pledged to increase the number of those.
10:30He's behind on his targets.
10:33And the Prime Minister, François Beirut, next week is updating Parliament in Paris on intended budget cuts,
10:40and he's being told by lots of people now that he needs to make sure that he safeguards the firefighters' budget.
10:47And I should say one thing.
10:49I mean, there have been in France already this year almost 6,000 fires,
10:54and only 10 of them have spread, basically, as a basic rule of thumb.
11:00And whilst we can look at how these measures could be improved,
11:06you know, that's not a bad rate, is it?
11:08It's just when it does go wrong, it goes horribly wrong, as we saw this week.
11:12Right. It's only July 10th.
11:13Could be a long, hot summer.
11:15Richard Asherton, many thanks.
11:16I want to thank, as well, Brian Sandberg for being with us from Chicago.
11:24Stay with us.
11:25There's more to come, more news, plus the France 24 debate.
11:29And we'll be talking about, well, the new patrons of nuclear deterrence for Europe.
11:35Could they be Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer?
11:38We'll go over some of the big announcements that have been made from their joint press conference.
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