Houdremont wind farm measuring mast vandalized
Matele, May 17, 2025

An unusual act of vandalism took place last weekend in the heart of the Ardennes countryside, in such a remote part of Houdremont (Gedinne) that the crime was only discovered yesterday. The measuring mast installed a few weeks ago as part of the wind farm project in the communes of Bièvre and Gedinne had been blown down. Some ill-intentioned person had cut the cables holding up the 80-meter tower. The wind is said to have done the rest.
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After Cannes, Nice targeted by electrical sabotage

Le Monde/Le Parisien, May 25, 2025 (excerpt)

The day after a power cut in and around Cannes, a transformer was deliberately set on fire in Nice on Saturday night. According to a police source and the public prosecutor’s office, the transformer in question is located in the Moulins district, to the west of the city.

“On May 25, 2025, at around 2 a.m., an electrical transformer on Avenue Paul Montel in Nice was deliberately damaged and set on fire,” the public prosecutor’s office said. “Traces of tires” were found, and a source close to the case referred to ‘a broken door [of the transformer’s premises]’.

Some 45,000 households were temporarily without power in Nice and the neighboring towns of Saint-Laurent-du-Var and Cagnes-sur-Mer, said Enedis. Nice’s streetcar network was briefly impacted, with a delayed resumption in the early morning, and the airport was temporarily without power. By 6 a.m., power had been restored.

A flagrante delicto investigation has been opened for “destruction by fire in an organized gang” and entrusted to the judicial police. For the time being, there is nothing to link this fire with the events of Saturday, when 160,000 people were left without power not far from Cannes.
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[On the night of Friday to Saturday, May 24, several fires broke out at the same Biançon/Saint-Cassien extra-high-voltage hydroelectric power station in Tanneron (Var), at around 2:45 am. The fence was cut and traces of accelerant were found on site. 47,000 homes were without power, from the east of Var to the west of the Alpes-Maritimes. Then, at 10 a.m., thirty-five kilometers away, the pylon of a 225,000 volt high-voltage power line supplying the city of Cannes faltered that morning. Located in Villeneuve-Loubet (Alpes-maritimes), the 28-metre-high pylon suffered “major damage”, with three of its four pillars “sawed off”, leaving 160,000 households in and around Cannes without power.

This double sabotage resulted in a huge blackout in the south-east of France, particularly in Cannes, Antibes, Grasse, Vallauris, Mandelieu-la Napoule and Saint-Cézaire-sur-Siagne. It cut off factories, institutions, shops, elevators, traffic lights, cash dispensers, internet and television (via the modems), the Orange cell phone network (most of the cell tower’s back-up batteries lasted only two hours), railroad lines (train cancellations between Grasse and Cannes and delays between Les Arcs and Antibes), police stations (Antibes, Grasse and Cannes) and film screenings at the 78th Cannes Film Festival. In short, as summed up by a local newspaper on Sunday (Var Matin, 25/5): “Telephone network down, traffic chaotic, stations blocked, businesses at a standstill: the blackout paralyzed a whole part of the territory, just as the world’s spotlights were focused on Cannes on the closing day of the 78th Film Festival.” Power was restored from 3pm onwards, and for all homes in the region only around 4:45pm.

Investigations have been opened by the Grasse and Draguignan public prosecutor’s offices following these acts of sabotage, and the Prefect of Alpes-Maritimes has obviously condemned these “serious acts of damage to the integrity of electrical infrastructures”. Below is an overview of the initial consequences of this anonymous blackout, as seen in the regional and national press on Sunday…]
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