“Suspected arson causes a second major power outage in south of France,” reads an Associated Press (AP) headline from earlier today. Today’s outage hit Nice at 2 a.m. and left some 45,000 households without power.
The outage on Saturday hit Cannes on the final day of that city’s famous film festival. The AP reports,
The Nice public prosecutor said a criminal investigation has been opened for “organized arson.”
The English word “sabotage” derives from French. In the earlier incident,
On Saturday, two other installations in the Alpes Maritime department were damaged in what officials also suspected to be arson, temporarily cutting power to 160,000 homes, including events at the Cannes Film Festival.
An unknown anarchist group claimed responsibility for the Cannes outage in a lengthy posting on the website indymedia.org.
The UK Telegraph reports on the Cannes incident,
Damien Savarzeix, the public prosecutor in Grasse, said on Saturday that three of the four pillars of a pylon on the high-voltage line in Villeneuve-Loubet, which supplies power to part of the area, including Cannes, “were sawn off” in a “malicious act”.
I’m guessing that if the perpetrators are ever caught, they won’t turn out to be those dangerous right-wingers everyone is worried about.
