On the road to reach the hamlet of Bordes, the pine forests are as dry as matches. Ferns, reddened by drought. Under the crushing heat, the houses of the small town seem empty. But Aline watches behind her blinds, the binoculars placed on the windowsill: “We take turns. Me, I was in my swimming pool when it started to burn. I took my car, I went to see. And over there, a car came out of the woods like crazy , he almost hit me. I saw the guy, but I couldn’t hold the plate.”
“A car came out of the woods”
The forties warned the gendarmes, she is summoned in a few days, to go and testify. Several outbreaks of fire have been noted in recent days around the town, the largest burned 90 hectares in La Roche Chalais overnight from Sunday to Monday. In their farm, Guillaume and his mother, farmers look at the clock: “It’s the critical hour. We have identified the hours when it lights up. We think it’s someone working, because it’s either on in the morning around six o’clock, or in the evening after 5 p.m. “.
This is the critical hour. We spotted the hours when it lights up
All the forest around is theirs. A part has already burned. The trail of the arsonist, they are convinced: “We know this forest, we grew up there, it’s the forest of my father and my grandfather”said William: “So many fire starts in such a short time, it is not possible otherwise”. With other local owners, the young farmer makes rounds, every day, sometimes at night. He put rubalises, to close the forest roads. And in this hunter’s land, it is better not to attack it.
“The forest here is the bank”
“He will have to calm down, because if the owners fall on him, it will go very badly for him”, assures the young man of 22 years. He’s not the only one to say it. Several residents shoot in the evening or during the day, the gun in the back of the car: “The gendarmes went to a neighbour’s house, they said to him: ‘it would be better for us to catch him rather than the owners.’ Her mother Nathalie disagrees, but she says it: “People are on edge. We’ve already had hail, the trees are dead, they’ve dried up on the spot. And now the fires. Here, the forest for people is the bank”.
We have already had hail, the trees are dead, they have dried up on the spot. And now the fires
The gendarmerie has deployed large resources in the Double sector since the fires at the start of the week. Guillaume, his mother and many local residents confirm that a helicopter circles regularly above the pine forests. Bikers pass, patrol cars too. There are even gendarmes in civilian clothes who do surveillance. She tries to temper the ardor of local residents, and encourages anyone who has seen a suspicious presence to report it to 17.
The Périgueux public prosecutor’s office has opened several investigations to “deliberate destruction by fire”, and the criminal hypothesis is preferred. But investigators are not ruling out other leads. But the judicial time is not that of the rumor, or the exasperation of the residents. A farmer from Bost says that every evening, he watches the sky to see if smoke is not escaping from the pine forests. The other day, Guillaume heard a fire siren downstairs. He came down in a panic: “It twists the guts”, said the young man. False alarm. The firefighters had simply taken the wrong path.