French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has been heckled on a visit to the area of the country worst hit by wildfires, as blazes continue to cause further deaths and evacuations across Europe.
About 200 people gathered at the town hall in Le Porge, south-western France, on Monday, where 183 homes burned down.
The organiser of a group of affected residents accused the prime minister of not wanting to meet them, while Lecornu’s office it has “nothing to hide” about how fire operations have been conducted, AFP reports.
The prime minister announced €12m (£10.3m) of aid for the Gironde and Landes regions, while the EU deployed assistance to Belgium and Spain.
Lecornu said the aid, of which €10m (£8.5m) will go to Gironde and €2m (£1.7m) to Landes, will allow local authorities to “launch projects without delay” and build “a sort of recovery plan”. He also announced building permits for the “equivalent reconstruction” of homes destroyed by the fires would be issued within a month, or even quicker.
Ludivine Daurignac, the organiser of the residents’ group, told the news agency the residents plan to file complaints to get “truth, transparency, and justice” and claimed they were blocked from meeting with the prime minister.
She said: “We were met by lines of riot police blocking our access.”
Another local told France’s BFM outlet: “We would like to know why the fire was managed this way. Why all the firefighters who were on site left to defend the tip of Ferret, while only the volunteer firefighters remained.”
Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from the Cap Ferret peninsula tourist spot west of Bordeaux last month as wildfires were spreading across Gironde.
Firefighters throughout the rest of Europe have been facing a series of blazes over the weekend, including officers in Belgium spending a fourth day beating back flames in the country’s largest nature reserve Hautes Fagnes.
