French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has been interrupted during a visit to the area of the country most affected by the wildfires, as the fires continue to cause more deaths and evacuations across Europe.
About 200 people gathered at Le Porge town hall in southwestern France on Monday, where 183 houses burned.
The organizer of a group of affected residents accused the prime minister of not wanting to meet with them, while Lecornu’s office has “nothing to hide” about how the fire operations have been carried out, 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 the Gironde and €2m (£1.7m) to the Landes, will allow local authorities to “launch projects without delay” and build “a kind of recovery plan”. He also announced that building permits for the “equivalent reconstruction” of homes destroyed by the fires would be issued within a month, or even sooner.
Ludivine Daurignac, an organizer of the residents group, told the news agency that residents plan to file complaints to obtain “truth, transparency and justice” and claimed that they were prevented from meeting the prime minister.
She said: “We were met with rows of riot police blocking our access.”
Another local told French media BFM: “We would like to know why the fire was managed this way. Why all the firefighters who were on the scene left to defend the Ferret point, while only the volunteer firefighters remained.”
Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from tourist spot on Cap Ferret peninsula west of Bordeaux last month as wildfires raged across the Gironde.
Firefighters in the rest of Europe have faced a series of fires over the weekend, including officers in Belgium who spent a fourth day putting out flames in the country’s largest nature reserve, Hautes Fagnes.
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