Britons among hundreds evacuated in French ski resort hotel fire
More than 90 firefighters tackled the blaze at the MMV Aime 2000 in La Plagne, which started at around 2.45am on Wednesday, according to local media.
Bruno Charlot, the sub-prefect of Albertville, told local media that 484 people were evacuated in 15 minutes, with only four having to be taken to hospital.
He said: 'In the end, four people were slightly injured, mainly as a result of light smoke poisoning.' He added that three had already been discharged from hospital after checks.
Paul Tucker, 76, a Briton who was staying at the hotel, said: 'People were hurrying but they weren't panicking, and we were out of the hotel in five minutes.'
Jennifer Tsang, a local mother who was helping with the rescue effort, said guests fled the building in only their nightwear, leaving their belongings behind.
She said: 'They had to run to the sports centre [where evacuated holidaymakers and staff were sheltered] in their bare feet. When I arrived at about 6am, there were people just in shorts and tops, they had no coats, nothing.'
One post on social media said many guests had lost clothes and ski equipment, and that some had lost 'everything'.
The UK Government's foreign travel advice page said it was aware of the fire.
'There is an ongoing incident following a fire on April 9 in the ski resort of La Plagne, in the Alps,' it said earlier. 'If you are in the area or planning to travel to the area, follow the advice of local authorities and check your tour operator's advice.'
Dame Menna Rawlings, the British ambassador to France, expressed her thanks to the authorities 'for their rapid and efficient action, which certainly saved lives during the night'.
Crystal Ski, a tour operator, said its customers were among those forced to flee. In a statement, its parent company said: 'We would like to apologise to customers whose holiday has been impacted following a contained fire at the Hotel Club MMV Plagne 2000 this morning.
'We can confirm that all customers were safely evacuated and have been moved to a nearby location where our team is taking care of them. Guests are being provided with necessary essentials needed including refreshments, food and clothing.'
Capucine Courau, 45, from Luxembourg, said that her husband 'heard some sort of explosion at around 2.30am, or at least a loud thud' in the hotel.
Everyone who lost their accommodation because of the fire was expected to have been rehoused by Wednesday afternoon, according to the local authorities in the resort.
'We have set up a system of accommodation in the various residences of the Plagne resort, and even in other resorts,' Jean Luc Boch, the mayor of La Plagne, said.
By mid-morning, the fire, which damaged three-quarters of the building, had been brought under control but not extinguished. Smoke was still visible in the early afternoon, and firefighters remained at the site.
The blaze started on the facade of the building and spread to the roof, said police and firefighters. Around 40 fire engines were mobilised to bring the fire under control and limit its spread to the adjoining building.
The fire's origin remains unknown, and an investigation is under way to determine this,' said Captain Cosney Bertrand, of the Albertville gendarmerie.
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National Geographic
a day ago
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Sea turtles are surviving—despite us
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'The sea was all thick with them, and they were of the very largest, so numerous that it seemed that the ships would run aground on them,' a Spanish priest wrote of Christopher Columbus's view of Cuba's sea turtles in 1494, during his second voyage. Some scientists today believe the pre-Columbian Caribbean alone may have been home to 91 million adult green turtles. That's roughly 10 times as many as all the adult sea turtles of every species believed to be alive today. So many occupied the Cayman Islands in the 1700s that English settlers used them to supply Jamaica with meat. It wasn't long before West Indies turtles were being served in London pubs and John Adams was slurping sea turtle soup during the First Continental Congress. Within a century, though, Caribbean turtle populations had crashed, sending turtle hunters to new coastlines, foreshadowing a great transition. 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They may be boiled in soup, cooked into omelets, or dropped raw into a shot glass with lemon, tomato juice, and pepper. Eggs don't bring huge dollars, but because most turtles lay 50 to 100 or more at once and leave long sandy tracks from sea to nest, they're easy to find and steal in volume. On the west coast of Australia's Cape York Peninsula, rangers from Pormpuraaw's land and sea management program cover sea turtle nests with cages to protect them from feral pigs, which eat turtle eggs and hatchlings. In most countries, selling turtle eggs has been illegal for years. Yet in 2018, police seized a pickup in Oaxaca, Mexico, loaded with garbage bags stuffed with 22,000 turtle eggs. Malaysian authorities two years earlier intercepted four Filipinos in wooden boats carrying 19,000 eggs. The $7,400 those sailors stood to make was nearly three times the average yearly wage in their community. Egg theft is often linked with poverty or drug and alcohol abuse, Pheasey says. But the hope is that fake eggs could help stop organized traffickers. On a recent Saturday near Guanacaste, Costa Rica, thieves raided 28 nests—a haul that included one of Pheasey's fake eggs. In Ostional, Costa Rica, olive ridleys nest so close together that they tend to crush and destroy one another's eggs, so authorities allow local residents to gather some turtle eggs for their own use and domestic sale. The harvest and sales are regulated. At 7 a.m. Monday, Pheasey watched on smartphone apps as her egg traveled from the peninsula to the back of a building on the mainland. After a delay, the egg moved again, to a neighborhood in San Ramón, 85 miles from the beach. Pheasey traced the route in her car. The egg had stopped at a supermarket loading dock. There it probably changed hands before being ferried to someone's house. Pheasey and Paso Pacífico are still working out kinks in their tactics, but even if the decoy eggs show promise in fighting smugglers, that's just one of the many problems turtles face. We're chewing up nesting beaches by erecting oceanfront skyscrapers, hotels, and subdivisions. We've illuminated coastlines with disorienting streetlights. When turtles manage to find sand in which to lay eggs, bright lights often send them wandering. Some get hit by cars. Pollution, from oily toxics to plastics, spills into coastal waters. Straws and plastic forks get sucked up turtles' noses. Hungry leatherbacks mistake plastic bags for jellyfish. New research suggests that nine million hawksbills were slaughtered in the past 150 years, mostly for their fiery red and gold carapaces, which were fashioned into hair clips, eyeglasses, jewelry boxes, and furniture. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) began banning the sale of turtle goods in the 1970s, but that hasn't always worked. In 2012, researchers found thousands of hawksbill pieces for sale in Japan and China. Solid numbers are unavailable, but scientists estimate that only 60,000 to 80,000 nesting female hawksbills remain worldwide. Meanwhile some countries still allow subsistence hunts for turtle meat. But even in countries where that practice has been outlawed, bans are meaningless without enforcement, buy-in from local residents, and alternatives for food or income. In Mozambique and Madagascar alone, for example, tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of both young and adult green turtles are illegally killed each year by hunters. Olive ridley eggs, freshly rinsed in the sea, are dumped onto a sorting table in Ostional, Costa Rica, shortly after being gathered from nests. The eggs will be packed in plastic bags and shipped by truck to restaurants and bars around the country. To fight poachers in Costa Rica, researcher Helen Pheasey fits decoy eggs with GPS transmitters, then slips them into sea turtle nests. Pheasey has tracked stolen eggs to commercial outlets many miles inland from nesting sites. There has been some promise in places where residents have bought in to the idea of turtle conservation. One morning in Costa Rica I sit in a delivery truck as the ocean flickers through the royal palms. Our payload: 80 large bags filled with 96,000 turtle eggs. A few miles down the road, we back up to an open shed. Men unload this delicate cargo onto a sorting table, where women begin placing the eggs in smaller bags. Soon they'll be repackaged and sold to restaurants and bars as far away as the capital, San José. Here it's all perfectly legal—and may even help turtles. 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Ostional didn't really become much of a community until sometime after World War II. But by the 1970s, settlers had come to rely on turtles. Soil nearby wasn't great for farming, and there were few jobs, so residents plucked turtle eggs to feed their pigs. 'Turtles were no more special to us than our chickens,' Maria Ruiz Avilés says during a break from labeling egg bags. At dawn on Trinidad's Grande Rivière, one of the most important leatherback nesting beaches in the world, an adult female uses her front flippers to toss sand over her egg chamber, hiding her future offspring from predators. Leatherback hatchlings dig their way out of their nest toward the surface. As the last layer of sand crumbles away, hatchlings boil out of the nest and scramble for the ocean, facing a gantlet of predators on land and at sea. Costa Rica began trying to prohibit egg harvests in the 1970s, but enforcement was lax. Researchers eventually recommended an arrangement: a regulated, legal, domestic trade. So many turtles show up during an arribada that they dig far more nests than the beach can accommodate. Even without poaching, up to half of the eggs on the beach were being destroyed, mostly by other turtles. Costa Rica's national government allows the few hundred residents of Ostional to legally collect a portion of the eggs. Today Ostional's egg harvest is viewed by many as a success. Residents take a small number of eggs, and some biologists think ridding the beach of the excess keeps microbes from killing more. Sales pay for beach patrols and enforcement to keep poachers out. Paperwork follows every sale, so buyers know the eggs are legal. Invested residents drive off predators to help remaining hatchlings get to the sea. 'We do a good job,' Ruiz Avilés says. That doesn't mean this model should be exported. Demand for eggs here is a fraction of what it is in, say, Mexico. And arribadas here offer an embarrassment of riches, because culling eggs may help more baby turtles survive. 'In my opinion, Ostional should never ever be taken as an example for conservation anywhere else—ever,' says Costa Rican Roldán Valverde, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. While some experts suggest this legal harvest prevents far more eggs from being taken illegally, others fear that legitimizing any of this trade perpetuates the black market. Unfortunately, we're stuck making decisions with imperfect information. Leatherback hatchlings encounter plastic bottles and other debris as they crawl across Trinidad's Matura Beach to reach the ocean. Nature Seekers, a local conservation group, organizes regular beach cleanups that have helped leatherbacks rebound there. In fact, it's often unclear how many sea turtles of each species remain—or how many is enough to ensure their survival. New research suggests that some population counts based on nesting beaches may be far too generous. But nest counts can also underestimate turtle numbers. 'We need to understand a lot more about what's happening in the water, where sea turtles spend 99 percent of their lives,' says Nicolas Pilcher, a sea turtle biologist who does fieldwork for governments and nonprofits. Pilcher is piloting a boat across shallow seagrass beds about 50 miles west of Abu Dhabi. He's conducting a turtle rodeo, chasing a green turtle as it zigs and zags just below the water's surface. Near the bow Marina Antonopoulou, with Emirates Nature-World Wildlife Fund, perches on the gunwale. When Pilcher shouts the signal, she launches onto the carapace, trying to wrestle the turtle to the surface and into the boat. But it wriggles free. Antonopoulou stands in the water, frustrated but amused. Pilcher pushes on. Antonopoulou and a team of scientists, including some from the Abu Dhabi government, are cruising the U.A.E.'s Marawah Marine Biosphere Reserve to gauge where these speedsters are headed. Near Pilcher's feet a half dozen green turtles lounge. A quick surgical procedure will tell him whether these animals are male or female and ready to mate and nest. The team will attach tracking devices to some, then release them all. 'We're trying to link where these turtles live, which is here, with where they lay their eggs,' Pilcher says. That's key to saving turtles. But turtles often feed in waters controlled by one government and nest on beaches controlled by another. This is especially true in the Middle East, where U.A.E. turtles may lay eggs in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, or even Pakistan. Conservationists and the Abu Dhabi government can't negotiate with neighboring countries for more protection without knowing which turtles go where. That matters, of course, because development in the Middle East is booming, and 'nesting habitat for turtles is continually shrinking,' Pilcher says. After harpooners land a leatherback in Indonesia's Kei Islands, villagers gather on the beach to watch the butchering process. Weighing up to 2,000 pounds, leatherbacks have long been a significant source of protein for the island communities. Sea turtle conservation has made great strides in recent decades in many places around the globe. In Florida and Hawaii, coastal resorts and hotels are reducing beachfront lighting. Use of devices that let unsuspecting turtles escape fishing nets helped save Kemp's ridleys in Mexico and loggerheads in the Atlantic and is being tried in other areas. We've closed fisheries and changed commercial fishing hooks to prevent accidental snagging. A few fishing fleets employ observers who document turtle interactions. Still, even as we make progress, complex new challenges are emerging. The sex of turtles is determined by the temperature of the sand where eggs gestate. Warmer sands produce more females, so as climate change drives sand temperatures higher across the tropics, more turtles are being born female. On a warm evening in a San Diego, California, bay, I watch a crew of scientists hold an adult green turtle while Camryn Allen quickly draws a vial of blood. For several years Allen, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has used hormones such as testosterone to track the sex of sea turtles. Here the ratio of females to males has increased slightly, but her recent work in Australia truly alarmed her. Raine Island, a 52-acre half-moon of sand on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef, is the biggest nesting island on Earth for green sea turtles. More than 90 percent of the northern Great Barrier Reef's green turtles deposit eggs here and on nearby Moulter Cay. But Allen and her colleagues discovered that as temperatures have risen, female green turtles born on Raine have come to outnumber males 116 to one. 'Seeing those results scared the crap out of me,' Allen says. A conch fisherman draws the attention of green sea turtles at Little Farmer's Cay in the Bahamas. Once prized for their meat, the island's green sea turtles are now valued more as tourist attractions. A large green turtle erupts from the muddy bottom of a mangrove-fringed inlet along the west coast of Fernandina Island in the Galápagos. Turtles here often seek refuge in warm water when winds cause cold-water upwelling. It's not the only threat climate change poses. As hurricanes become more powerful, they're wiping out more turtle nests. Rising seas also are flooding nest sites and drowning eggs. And yet for all that, there are hopeful signs. Turtles didn't survive 100 million years without developing strategies to weather hard times. They can slow their metabolism and go months without eating. Some females have skipped nesting seasons for years, only to show up again a decade later. New research suggests males may mate with many females when populations are stretched thin. And sea turtles may switch nesting beaches in times of stress. Allen's initial fear has tapered off as she's seen turtles' versatility. 'We may lose some smaller populations, but sea turtles are never going to go away completely,' she says. 'I think turtles, out of all the other species, might actually have a pretty good shot.' They just can't do it by themselves. Staff writer Craig Welch reported on thawing permafrost in the September issue. This is photographer Thomas P. Peschak's tenth assignment for National Geographic. Photographic coverage for this story was supported by Hussain Aga Khan, the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation, and the Save Our Seas Foundation.
UPI
a day ago
- UPI
'People We Meet on Vacation' adaptation gets January premiere date
1 of 4 | British actor Tom Blyth stars in "People We Meet on Vacation," which streams on Netflix in January. File Photo by Allison Dinner/EPA-EFE July 1 (UPI) -- Netflix announced People We Meet on Vacation, an adaptation of Emily Henry's romantic comedy novel, will premiere on the streaming service Jan. 9. The premiere date for the film, which stars Tom Blyth as Alex and Emily Bader as Poppy, was announced with a video featuring the voices of the two stars. "Where does Alex Nilsen stand on travel?" Poppy asks in the video. "Love or hate?" "I mean, I've never really traveled anywhere," Alex answers. "But this morning I saw this beautiful sunrise over this place that I'd never been before, and I wouldn't have if everything had gone according to plan. So, love. I'm thinking love." The film also stars Sarah Catherine Hook, Jameela Jamil, Lucien Laviscount, Lukas Gage, Miles Heizer, Tommy Do, Alice Lee, Alan Ruck and Molly Shannon. "Free-spirited Poppy and routine-loving Alex have been unlikely best friends for a decade, living in different cities but spending every summer vacation together," the official synopsis reads. "The careful balance of their friendship is put to the test when they begin to question what has been obvious to everyone else -- could they actually be the perfect romantic match?" People We Meet on Vacation starts streaming Jan. 9 on Netflix.
