Nessie. She is parked on the grass in Normandy, matte black, snorkel up, winch bolted to the bumper, James Baroud tent unfolded on the roof, Tara half-asleep inside with the cat mildly offended by my presence. The Seine catches the last of the light behind her. Land Rover Defender 110, Td5 under the bonnet, thirty years old this summer. Still starts on the first turn if you know where to put the throttle (kidding of course: she starts when she feels like it.) Smells convincingly of diesel and old oil. The smell of a life that has not yet been sanitized for a marketing deck.
She is also, tonight, younger than every Canadair France owns.
The twelve CL-415 water bombers of the Sécurité Civile, the amphibious yellow-and-red aircraft supposed to stand between the South of France and a wall of flame and certain death, have an average age of thirty years. My Landy takes a ten-year-old and a cat camping. The French Republic uses aircraft of the same vintage to try to stop the country from burning down.
Cute.
Some days last summer, none of them could fly. Not one. Bombardier stopped making the CL-415 in 2015, so every spare part is now a scavenger hunt across three continents and one nostalgic Canadian warehouse. Écopage in salt water accelerates the corrosion, because these planes were never designed to scoop the Mediterranean (they were designed for Quebec lakes, which is a different chemistry class entirely). When the phone rings at the base in Nîmes-Garons and a village is burning outside Narbonne, the tarmac occasionally answers with an empty pause. My daughter has a rooftop tent from a Portuguese brand that is newer than the air-fleet supposed to save Narbonne. I am not the one whose vineyards are on fire.
The season we did not want to keep having
98.000 hectares in France since January. That is the record Laurent Nuñez, Minister of the Interior in the Lecornu II government, announced on 25 July, calling it “historic,” calling it “unprecedented,” calling it “a month early.” 200.000 evacuations. The Gironde blaze alone crossed 30.000 hectares, second only to the 1949 Landes fire (52.000 ha, back when the country was still cutting down forests with axes and there were four cars in Bordeaux). Last August, Ribaute in the Aude: 17.000 hectares in three weeks, one dead in Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse (a 65-year-old woman named Josette who refused to leave her house), 25 injured, 19 of whom were firefighters. Ribaute broke a fifty-year Mediterranean record. That record is now the new normal, kept warm on the shelf for next August.
Spain crossed its ten-year annual burn average with the summer only half done. In Almería, thirteen people died in one fire on 10 July, four of them presumed British tourists trapped inside a right-hand-drive car who could not turn around fast enough on a dry riverbed track that turned into a lethal funnel. In Guadalajara, north of Madrid, another 32.000 hectares gone, 34 villages evacuated. Three southern-European firefighters killed inside 48 hours. Santé Publique France counted 5.764 excess deaths between 17 June and 2 July, most of them old people in flats without a fan, quietly leaving without a press conference.
The pub, the LinkedIn feed, and the armed penguins
I live in Belgium. I have a house in Normandy. I move around a lot, so I hear the neighborhood monologue in three languages, and in all three it goes roughly the same. Fires have always happened. This is nothing new. Climate is fine, it is cyclical. You cannot trust Copernicus, that is European propaganda. Santé Publique France cooked the numbers, they always do. The old people would have died anyway. A cigarette started Ribaute, so it isn’t even climate, is it.
These are the same people who told me the vaccine had a microchip, that the Earth is flat (or, in the sophisticated version, “we can’t really know, can we”), that Bill Gates puts iron in the clouds, that 5G kills bees, that Ursula von der Leyen is a transitioning lizard, that JFK Jr. is coming back, that the Great Reset is a thing, that Macron wears an earpiece from Klaus Schwab, and that in Antarctica an army of trained penguins guards the entrance to the Hollow Earth. Yes, armed penguins. That was a real thread on Belgian Facebook. I saved a screenshot for the archives.
Denial is not a school of thought. It is a hobby. It is what people do when reading a graph would require them to feel slightly bad about their SUV, their weekend flight to Málaga or the pool in the garden. The climate denier, the antivax uncle, the flat-earther and the guy waiting for the penguin uprising are not four different people. They are one worldview with four flavors of costume, and the through-line is always the same: I refuse to update the model in my head, so the world must be lying. Ribaute burned. Josette died. The forest is now a black stripe you can see from orbit. Argue with the satellite.
Anyway: money.
The billion-four backstroke
Seine sanitization for the Paris 2024 Olympics: €1.4 billion. Not a Facebook number, the official one, published by DRIEAT Île-de-France on the state’s own site. Half of it, €700 million, came directly from the state via Agence de l’eau Seine-Normandie. The rest from the city of Paris, from the region, from SIAAP, from every taxpayer who ever bought a baguette and a pint of Pastis.
For what, precisely? So Anne Hidalgo could do the backstroke in front of a camera. So a triathlon could take place in water that closes again the moment it rains. So the President could tweet that the Republic had conquered a century of impossibility in four years. As of last summer the river is not reliably swimmable. A billion four for a photo op with brown foam.
A new De Havilland DHC-515 firefighting aircraft, successor to the CL-415, costs France €91 million all-in once you count VAT, customs and spares. Divide €1.4 billion by €91 million. Fifteen new water bombers. Fifteen. That is more than the entire modernized fleet the Republic wants to have in the sky by 2033, when the plan is to move from twelve to sixteen aircraft over ten patient years (country fires are on a different growth plan). The Seine budget alone could have almost doubled France’s aerial firefighting capacity in a single procurement cycle. Instead we got a river you can swim in when it doesn’t rain, which in Paris is called February 30th.
If planes are not your love language, translate to trucks. That same €1.4 billion buys around three thousand CCFS super forest firetrucks, the 4×4 tankers the SDIS send into ravines at three in the morning to prevent villages from carbonizing. France operates about three hundred of them, at €450,000 apiece. Ten times the current fleet. Every SDIS in every department, tripled, with lending capacity to Spain for when their coast lights up. Which it does. It just did. It still is.
The opening ceremony, or how to spend a Canadair on a boat party
Then the little matter of the Olympic opening ceremony. Six kilometers of choreography on the Seine, tall boats, famous names, a floating cauldron, Céline Dion up the Tower. Beautiful, I will grant that. I even watched it, mildly seduced (the Tower does that to Belgians, we cannot help ourselves). Cost, per the government’s own October 2024 budget report: approximately €100 million. Le Canard Enchaîné, less charitable, put it at €122 million. Neither number includes the security operation, which was gigantic and remains, conveniently, uncounted in any document you can pull up on a website. London 2012 spent €30 million on Wembley. Paris spent three to four times that on a river cruise.
€100 million is a Canadair. It is, actually, one Canadair with change left over for the parts department. It is also 222 super CCFS trucks. Or 408 mid-size CCF forest tankers at €245,000 each. One evening of choreography on the water, or four operational seasons of aerial firefighting.
There is a date pair I cannot let go of. Night of 26 July 2024, roughly ten thousand athletes floating past Notre-Dame while Céline Dion sang from the Eiffel Tower. Almost exactly a year later, 5 August 2025, dry brush at Ribaute caught fire. By the time it was done, seventeen thousand hectares of the Corbières had burned and Josette from Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse had died in her own kitchen because the trucks that could have reached her were the wrong age, the aircraft that could have covered her were the wrong age, and the funding that could have fixed all of it was still bobbing gently in the Seine wearing a swimsuit.
Six submarines, or thirteen Canadairs each
Now the big one. The Barracuda program, six Suffren-class nuclear attack submarines to replace the aging Rubis boats, comes in at €10.42 billion in 2014 euros, about €1.73 billion per boat. Adjusted for inflation, closer to €2 billion each. The French Senate itself puts the unit cost at €1.32 billion in 2014 constant terms, “hors développement“. Pick your end of the range. We are talking about a boat that costs more than a small city and probably smells better.
One Suffren is nineteen Canadairs. One. It is roughly 3.850 super forest trucks, so about thirteen times the entire current French fleet. It is protective equipment, training budget, housing bonuses, a fresh generation of drones for every SDIS in every département, and there is still change left to grab a couple of Dash-8s from the Canadians while we are at it.
I am not arguing France should have no submarines. A Republic with proper defenses is a healthy Republic, and my Belgian ancestors would like a word if I forgot that (we are the country the tanks roll through, historically). The question is the ratio. We can hunt a Russian carrier at thirty knots six hundred meters below the Atlantic, and we cannot cover a hillside above Narbonne in July. Both of those things are true right now, on the same tax base, in the same Republic. What kind of country decides that?
Because the enemy has already arrived. It is not the Maghreb immigrants, it is not Russian, it is not Chinese, it does not ride a submarine and it does not carry a rifle. It is a stationary heat dome over Occitanie. It is a Tramontane carrying embers ten kilometers in an hour. It is the four hundred parts per million we all failed to stop pretending were fine. Against that enemy, one Suffren is worth less than nineteen Canadairs and two thousand fresh trucks.
The bike race and its twenty-eight thousand escorts
I have never liked the Tour. Forgive me. I find grown men in Lycra rolling through a landscape at a suspicious 45 kph slightly ridiculous, and I am aware this places me in a small Belgian minority alongside seven grandmothers and a retired goat, but here we are. So I am the ideal person to look at the numbers without a fan’s forgiveness.
The Tour 2026 mobilized roughly 28.000 police, gendarmes and firefighters across the route (ASO’s own headline number, printed on the “key figures” fact sheet). The invoice, obviously, does not exist. In the single département of Isère, more than 2.000 gendarmes for one weekend, including two escadrons of gendarmerie mobile added to the two already permanently attached to the race. The state does not publish the total public bill for Tour security. It never has. I find that mildly hilarious in a country that lectures the rest of Europe about transparency.
You do not need a spreadsheet to see the priority. On July 6th, a wildfire in the Pyrénées-Orientales had already devoured 4.600 hectares and forced the Perpignan stage to close to spectators. Later in July, the Paris finale had to be shortened from 133 to 89 kilometers to free up rescue services for the Gironde fires. Twenty-eight thousand uniforms guarding a bike race that had to be shrunk so the country could try not to burn.
Catalonia paid roughly €20 million in total public money just to host the Barcelona Grand Départ (€9.68M host fee plus the security and logistics ring around it). Two months later, Spain crossed its ten-year burn average. Twenty million euros is 44 CCFS super trucks or a full aerial firefighting season. The Catalans could have bought themselves the beginning of their own defense. Instead they bought a start line for a race that finishes in Paris.
The volunteer from Savoie
On 8 July 2026, a 22-year-old volunteer firefighter was killed by falling rocks while fighting a fire on a steep slope in Savoie. I am not putting this in a blog post to farm outrage. What matters, for the record, is that he was 22 and a volunteer, underpaid, underequipped. On 21 July, two more sapeurs-pompiers were killed near Mérignac (BFMTV), trapped in a fire truck by twenty-meter flames near Bordeaux airport, in the same département where 32.000 hectares of pine were currently being fed to the sky. Nuñez went to Bordeaux to meet their families. Good. He should have. I would also like him to meet the equipment budgets he did not fight for.
The pacte capacitaire, France’s flagship national plan for the entire SDIS network, is €150 million (part of a €250M envelope announced in 2022). One-tenth of the Seine cleanup. One-thirtieth of the low-end Paris 2024 public bill. That is the actual national investment in the equipment that keeps the country from burning. The rest is fireworks, submarines, and choreography.
What will actually not be done
I am not going to write a fantasy paragraph where Macron cancels a Suffren, buys the Canadairs, disbands the Tour security, and hands the savings to a firefighter. That will not happen. Nothing in the French political ecosystem allows that to happen. The submarines were signed a decade ago, the Olympics are done and gone, the Tour is a national religion, and admitting that the country’s fire fleet is a scandal would require a Minister of the Interior to say that the previous Minister of the Interior was an idiot, which, in France, is against the constitution.
So I am not asking for cancellations. I am asking for a priority. One serious sentence in a budget speech. One decision, on one page, that says: the enemy this century is heat, and we will fund the fight against heat first, and everything else second. One boring, unphotogenic, unheroic redirection of budget. Move €500 million out of prestige and into hoses. Buy the sixteen Canadairs by 2029 instead of 2033. Triple the pacte capacitaire. Give the volunteers a wage that reflects the actual danger of a falling rock. Replace the 4x4s the volunteers are dying in.
None of that requires a submarine to be cancelled. It requires priorities to be admitted out loud. Which is why it will not happen. In France, admitting a priority in public is treated as a form of surrender.
The Landy, again
Tara is coming down the ladder now, the cat is protesting, the sun is properly gone, the river is turning that shade of Normandy grey that Boudin got paid to paint. I will (try to) start the Landy, drive us to the house, cook something ordinary. She will start. She always starts. Sooner or later. Mostly.
She is younger than the aircraft supposed to save the South of France, and older than every mainstream political priority currently competing with the fire.
The penguins, meanwhile, are not coming. The heat already did.
