ENVIRONMENT-FRANCE: The Road to Pollution Reopens

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Jun 26 2002 (IPS) - The Mont Blanc tunnel between France and Italy reopened this week amidst tear gas shells fired on protesters.

The tunnel across the Alps reopened Tuesday after a fire from a truck killed 39 people inside the tunnel three years ago.

The tunnel was reopened in the face of continuing protests from environmental groups and by local residents in the French Alpine cities Chamonix and Frejus. Authorities in Paris and in Rome went ahead with rebuilding and reopening the tunnel in the face of the protests.

Thousands of French demonstrators gathered to block the tunnel Tuesday and Wednesday. The police fired tear gas shells Wednesday morning to clear the tunnel for a convoy of trucks.

“Trucks pollute the air and threaten our health,” a demonstrator shouted Wednesday. The demonstrators are demanding the use of railways instead to transport goods.

“The Alps are one of the most beautiful regions of the world, and we destroy it with the transport on trucks,” another demonstrator said.

Conservative leaders too have joined the protest against the reopening of the tunnel. Eric Fournier, deputy mayor of Chamonix, and member of the right-wing party Union for the Presidential Majority (UMP) party headed by President Jacques Chirac, urged the government to intervene on the transport through the Alps.

“We have to create the conditions of the passage through the Alps in such a way that economy and environment become allies, and not enemies,” says Fournier who is also vice-president of the French region Rhone Alps, in charge of transport policy.

Fournier has threatened to block the region’s participation in the creation of a railway link between the southern French city of Lyon and the northern Italian metropolis of Turin, scheduled to be completed by 2018.

“If only aberrant transport projects are proposed, we won’t pay for them,” Fournier said. “In the region between the lake of Geneva and the Mediterranean live more than 15 million people, who have to suffer the transport aberrations governments and lobbies force upon them,” Fournier added. “Now it is enough.”

Other protesters argue that trucks affect health. “France has the highest rate of deaths caused by air pollution in Europe,” says Philippe Quenel, responsible from the French National Institute of Health Watch.

In a survey published this week, Quenel says about 2,800 people die every year in France from emissions from combustibles of the kind produced by trucks.

About half of these deaths are provoked by heart disorders and about a tenth by respiratory deficiencies, Quenel says.

Quenel argues that more than the half these deaths could be avoided if these emissions are halved. Quenel found that the Alpine region east of Lyon is the most affected by pollution. Pollution here crosses levels officially considered alarming, particularly in the summer.

Surveys of this type have been conducted in other European countries for long, says Yves Bouillard, a physician living in Chamonix. “Only in France this medical reality linked to pollution has been kept hidden,” Bouillard says.

“We continue to repeat the same mistake we have been making for decades,” says Noel Mamerre, leader of the Green Party. “We should be giving priority to the railways by now,” he said. “Instead, we continue to give in to the powerful lobby of truck companies.”

European Union (EU) figures indicate an increasing use of road transportation. In 1990 railways transported about 255,000 tonnes of goods per kilometre. Trucks carried almost four times as much. By 1998, this ratio had increased – the transported 241,000 tonnes per kilometre. Trucks were carrying 1.25 million tonnes a kilometre.

By 2010, the EU believes trucks will carry 1.9 million tonnes a kilometre while the railways will more or less stagnate with a load of 272,000 tonnes a kilometre.

“This development goes against all logic, be it environmental or of health, or transport security,” says Mamerre. Only 8 per cent of the merchandise freight is made on rail road, against 45 per cent in the U.S. “It is not very glorious for us to see that in environmentally sound transport, we lag back behind the U.S.,” Mamerre said.