Playing with Fire

On February 18^th, with temperatures in the 50’s and five more weeks of winter to go, I was outside watering my plants while France was breaking a record: 25 winter days without a drop of rain. We’ve had plenty of sunshine and plenty of cold—the 50° day was an exception, but no rain to replenish water tables, already depleted by two summers of drought and extended heat waves.

          In France, the Loire River, the country’s longest, is considered a natural border between north and south. To the north, we’ve experienced summer and winter drought, yet we don’t live with the visible signs, nor have we experienced the devastating forest fires that have ravaged large sections of southern France.

          Last summer, at the start of the long Bastille Day weekend, instead of celebrating, many were fleeing their homes or campgrounds menaced by forest fires while the rest of the nation watched as natural treasures went up in flames. Particularly hard hit were the pinelands of southwest France. Along the Atlantic Ocean, south of the city of Bordeaux, les Landes, as this area is known, was a tinder keg after a year of record droughts. 

July fires in southwest Frane

          Fires there began in two different locations on July 12^th, one due to an electrical fire in a utility vehicle travelling on a fire road. The second was of criminal origin though a culprit has never been identified. On July 19^th, the fires were still raging, and more broke out in the following weeks.

          Finally, on September 28, 2022, with more than 80,000 acres of pineland destroyed, the French government announced that the fires were officially out.

          Except they weren’t. And here is where a connection to the coal region comes in.

          Until the mid-19^th century, “les Landes” were just that; in French the word refers to heath- and grasslands. Across this region of southwest France were also scattered marshland and peat bogs. For centuries sheep grazed on this unstable ground and shepherds watching their flocks perched on stilts to keep their feet dry. In the 1850’s, Emperor Napoleon III ordered the planting of maritime pines. The forests would firm up the earth and they could be exploited for their wood and resins. 

Painting of Jean-Louis Gintrac (1808-1886)

With the forests came the railroad and the development of local industry. With industry came an increased demand for energy and in the 1920’s, drilling for oil began in les Landes and la Gironde, two neighboring “départements” (administrative divisions or counties). There was no oil, but deposits of lignite were discovered near the town of Hostens, located on the border between les Landes et La Gironde.

Lignite, also known as “brown coal,” is sedimentary rock formed by naturally compressed peat. In Europe today, and especially in Germany, it is used in the production of electricity. It is also known as being one of the dirtiest fossil fuels, with a heating value much lower than that of bituminous coal. 

The lignite-fired electric power plant in Hostens in the 1930's

          When lignite was discovered at Hostens, it was considered a boon. Mining and quarrying began in 1928 and continued till 1964, when the deposits were depleted. At that time, the lignite of the region produced 2% of the nation’s electricity and 36% of the electricity of the nearby city of Bordeaux. In 1966, the site, which belonged to the national electric company, EDF, Electricité de France, was permanently closed.

          When lignite production ended, the town of Hostens, with a population of 1190, lost 40% of its inhabitants. Company housing for miners near one of the quarries became a ghost town. In 1967, EDF gave the mining site to the département of la Gironde, which turned it into a regional park. The quarries, filled with water, became lakes with sandy beaches. The surrounding pinelands were crisscrossed with bike paths and hiking trails.

Before the fire

          Until last summer’s fires, le Domaine de Hostens, the name of this regional park of nearly 2,000 acres, attracted 200,000 visitors a year, many who benefited from the park’s cabins and campsites. The site was also a nature preserve, home to rare species of plants and trees. The forest and the facilities burned to the ground in the July and August fires.

The fire continues today because of the presence of lignite

          When the mining site was definitively closed in 1966, the deposits of lignite were declared “exhausted.” On September 28, 2022, the Hostens fire was officially declared “out.”

 I think readers from the coal region can guess what happened next. Lignite deposits remained. The forest fires ignited them. Since summer, the lignite has been burning slowly—but at very high temperatures, over 500°F, and there is no human means to stop the fire.

          Experts are banking on heavy rainfall to extinguish it, but their hypothesis cannot be tested because so far, little or no rain has fallen in the region since August 2021. Locals who experienced lignite fires in 1948 and 1949, remember they burned on for years. The old-timers say the only way to put them out is to “drown them.”

          Since the 1960’s, as anyone from the anthracite region knows, underground mine fires have been burning in and around Centralia. I remember driving through in the 1960’s when it was still a town. Then I remember driving on Route 61 between Ashland and Centralia before the highway closed, with wisps of smoke from underground fires rising from crevices on each side of the road. Then, in places the highway caved in. 

Route 61 between Ashland and Centralia

          Today there is still disagreement about the causes of the Centralia fires though proof exists of a 1962 fire in a landfill in an abandoned strip mine that ignited veins of coal. This slow-burning fire produced carbon monoxide, “white damp,” that seeped into homes at dangerous levels, leading to the breakup of a close-knit community. I think there is agreement that the Centralia fire contains the elements of tragedy.

          In France today, nearly 70% of all electricity is generated by nuclear power and the government wants to build and open new nuclear power plants. So far, there has been no Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, but such accidents cannot be ruled out. As energy sources grow scarce and the dangers of global warming increase, no matter where we are on the globe, no matter what energy source we use, we are all “playing with fire.”

   

A map of nuclear power plants in France