On Monday night, November 26, two excavators went up in smoke in the Au-Haidhausen district of southeast Munich. More precisely, at around 3 a.m., they went up in flames in Zeppelinstrasse, where a bicycle path extension project was underway. The two burnt-out construction machines belonged to the Strabag Group, one of Europe’s largest construction companies, involved in every conceivable infamy on the planet.

In the prison-city that serves as Bavaria’s capital, this is of course not the first time that construction equipment has been set ablaze at night, each time causing “several tens of thousands of euros” worth of damage, as on this chilly late November day. Since 2019, the police have counted no fewer than thirty such incendiary attacks in and around Munich, a review of which can be found here.

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Near Montpellier. Brissac quarry: metal conveyor belts destroyed by fire
Actu.fr, October 24, 2024 (excerpt)

Fire alert at 6:45 a.m. on Thursday, October 24, 2024, at the Brissac quarry in the Gangeois region, north of Montpellier: metal conveyor belts used to transport ore were completely engulfed in flames at the CMSE (Carrières & Matériaux Sud-Est) extraction site operated by Colas, at Le Devois de la Vernède, on the Notre-Dame-de-Londres road.

Some fifteen conveyors were destroyed and twenty damaged, and may still be out of use. The offices, other adjoining buildings and the fleet of Colas vehicles were spared. The fifteen or so employees could find themselves out of work, while the provisional loss is estimated at 6 million euros. Fire detection experts and technicians from the criminal identification unit of the Hérault Gendarmerie are on the scene.

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On Sunday night, September 9, the waxing moon had just formed its first quarter over Lake Starnberg, some twenty kilometers southwest of Munich. Was this enough for the fish to discern the thick smoke coming from the wind farm that has been standing for ten years in the forest above the village of Berg, on the right bank of the lake? In any case, they won’t breathe a word to the investigators from the Upper Bavarian Criminal Investigation Department, tasked with solving the arson attack on one of the giants planted there at around 3am. Firstly, as a matter of dignity. Secondly, as a matter of principle, the limpid waters of the Ice Age have seen many others, such as the lifeless body of King Ludwig II, or the first summers of his cousin “Sissi”, before she was lightened of her burden on the shores of another lake by the sharpened blade of an anarchist.

What happened on that cold autumn night in the forest between a freeway and the eastern shore of Lake Starnberg? According to Bürgerwind Berg GmbH, the engineering office in charge of technical support for the Alpine wind farm operator, a first warning message was sent to them by the safety sensors on a wind turbine, followed by a second at around 3:59 a.m., which recited in code: “smoke in the nacelle”. In other words, in the machine room, some 150 meters up on the rotor side. The facts became much simpler as soon as the sleuths were able to get to the scene. According to the police report, unknown persons attacked the massive door of the wind tower with an angle grinder, cutting an opening of “40 by 60 centimetres”, before introducing “previously ignited objects” inside the structure.

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Around 3 a.m. on Sunday night, September 2, employees of a small company called the fire department to report a fire at their neighbor’s premises. Their neighbor, in the Detmoldstraße industrial park to the north of Munich, is none other than a huge factory: the Max Bögl Concrete Plant, which has been covering the world in its filth since 1929 and, according to its own figures, employs 6,500 people at 40 sites worldwide.

On site, the firefighters were quickly dismayed. The flames were engulfing the production site in various places. On one side, six concrete transport trucks were ablaze, on the other an excavator, and finally, high in the sky, the company’s conveyor belt lit up the night. Despite the general alarm sounded by the first firefighters, who were joined by some fifty colleagues, the fire continued to spread, and the conveyor belt fire eventually reached the top of the mixing silo, starting to eat away at it, at the same time as several blocks of compressed cardboard from a nearby waste disposal site began to smell a bit scorched. It wasn’t until 6.30 a.m. that the sabotage against the concrete plant, which caused millions of euros worth of damage, was finally extinguished.

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On September 9, on the occasion of attacks on industrial wind turbines in Mamoiada and Villacidro, we published a short summary of mobilizations against “energy speculation” in Sardinia, with some details about the two sabotages at the end of August.

As it happens, the series didn’t stop there, as a third occurred shortly afterwards against one of the countless “green” nuisances being installed on the island. On the night of Monday to Tuesday, September 11, at around 4 a.m., in the Garganu area near Tuili in the south of the territory, two thousand photovoltaic panels were completely destroyed after being sprayed with petrol and then set alight. The panels had been stored at the site for use by Polish energy multinational Greenvolt Power.

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In Sardinia, as in many other parts of Europe, energy projects to feed green capitalism have been proliferating for several years. In these sunny and seaside regions, already infested by mass tourism, these are mainly solar and wind farms.

On this Mediterranean island off the coast of Corsica, monsters of steel and cement must be built at all costs, even if it means uprooting olive, apricot and almond trees by force, to be replaced by huge industrial wind turbines with masts up to 200 meters high. Nearly 800 new “renewable energy production” projects are officially being studied, some of which are symbolic of all the others, such as that of the Chinese multinational Chint, which in April 2024 purchased over a thousand hectares in the north of the island (at Nurra), in order to build the largest solar farm ever conceived in Europe. Faced with growing citizen protests, ranging from local committee demonstrations to picketing the port of Oristano in an attempt to block the arrival of a shipment of wind masts, and arguing in particular for the landscape and the fact that Sardinia cannot continue to be ravaged in this way just to export so-called “green” energy to the mainland, the region’s president soon found herself faced with a dilemma.
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