“We've come through another week of flood alerts, it's passed,” says Allan Turpin reassuringly. For the fourth time in just a handful of weeks the mayor of Andres in the Pas-de-Calais département (county), of northern France has spent the day watching the sky, fearful that it might rain too much and that the rivers might again flood.
In November and January the waters reached historic levels in the département, leading to dozens of people being evacuated and causing huge distress to flood victims. As a result of these repeated climatic events, some inhabitants have even vowed to leave the area for good. Meanwhile on Monday France's prime minister Gabriel Attal visited several communities in the area to monitor the local resilience plans designed to help the region cope with weather-related disasters.
“I don't want to see people in this state again, that's why I'm fighting,” explains Noël Bodelle, a former roofer. His current battle is against a housing development in his home town of Wizernes, a small community of 3,000 inhabitants close to the larger Pas-de-Calais town of Saint-Omer. A main topic of discussion in the community is the planning permission given to two developments that will lead to 30 new homes being built not far from the town centre.
The problem is that the land on which these developments will be built has flooded twice, as shown by a video that Mediapart has seen. The proposed developments are in fact located just a few metres from the river Aa, which has been the source of the recent floods. When he heard about the plans for these development plans Noël Bodelle appealed to the town hall, asking them to reconsider the decision. The town hall replied a month later, saying his appeal had been rejected.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
“I'm not against housing projects, but they must at least put planning permission on hold and study the risks again,” he explains. He talks in the plural because there are many planned housing developments that will potentially be at risk of flooding. At nearby Arques, for example, which has a population of 9,000 people, the town council last year set an objective of building 375 new homes between now and 2028. This is a community where images of the main square being under water are still fresh in people's minds. “Among these developments there's one where the work had to stop because of the floods,” says Noël Bodelle.
The tensions around this issue keep growing. The president of the joint council of local villages and towns in this area, Joël Duquenoy, feels that controversial plans to extend a business park at Saint-Martin-lez-Tatinghem have been moving too slowly. So he tried to apply pressure, announcing in the regional newspaper La Voix du Nord in April 2023 that the project would be carried out “whatever it takes”. In the same newspaper he argued: “I have already warned the sub-prefecture: one day cranes will arrive at the zone even if we haven't received the necessary permissions.”
And as the concern of local residents over flood risk grows, so the debate has got wider. The issue is no longer just the developments that risk being flooded directly themselves. At Ardres, for example, there are plans for a housing estate with a total of 172 home extending over seven hectares (just over 17 acres) of farmland. The land itself has never flooded but what is causing concern is that rain that can no longer be absorbed by the soil will simply run off the new hard surfaces and flow elsewhere. The state regional environmental body the Mission Régionale d’Autorité Environnementale (MRAE) stated that “the permeability of the soil is such that water penetration there is impossible”, creating a very real risk of water run-off. When contacted, the local council concerned did not respond.
Political oversight
Where developments are directly impacted by flood risk the argument of the local councils is always the same: that the local area planning framework (the PLU or PLUI) and flood prevention plans (the PPRI) have been respected. The mayor at Wizernes, Pierre Évrard, himself uses these arguments; he told La Voix du Nord that the development in his town was drawn up “with strict respect for the rules imposed by the [PPRI] and the [PLUI]” and that “it could not be challenged”.
Yet for critics of such housing developments there are question marks over the scope of the flood prevention plans themselves. Many concerned residents have called for these plans to be revised, given that their forecasts have been overtaken by recent events on the ground. The Ministry of Ecological Transition and Regional Cohesion says it has launched a taskforce which will “feed into thinking on the need for any update to the PPRI [editor's note, the flood prevention plan], an update that comes under the remit of the prefect”. The prefecture in Pas-de-Calais did not respond to Mediapart's requests for comment.
What worries critics is that the boundaries of these PPRI flood risk plan areas are subject to oversight by local politicians. Cases where local councils have been opposed to a section of land being classed as a major major flood risk, so it can then be developed as a commercial zone, are not uncommon. That was the case, for example, in the nearby community of Saint-Léonard, which opposed the local PPRI so it could create a business park – on a plot of land which then flooded last November. While in such cases it is the prefect who has the final word, the stance of some local councils does not support a reduction in flood risk.
It is a large-scale problem given that this region – the Hauts-de-France - is the second most built-up area in France after the Paris region. The region concreted over some 16,000 hectares (just under 40,000 acres) between 2011 and 2020. In the Pas-de-Calais département itself some 15% of the land is built on, above the national average of 10%. For many critics this is one of main causes of the repeated and major floods across the region.
Not everyone agrees. Speaking in January, the president of the Hauts-de-France region, Xavier Bertrand, rejected the link. “The floods are in the centre of rural areas not in the most built-up areas. The floods are not in the industrial zones, you just have to come and see that on the ground,” he told Politico.
However, the facts show that it is not commercial or industrial areas that are responsible for the greatest prevalence of artificial surfaces in the département. According to figures from the state agency CEREMA (the Centre for Studies and Expertise on Risks, the Environment, Mobility and Urban Planning), some 25% of the land (amounting to 260 hectares or 642 acres) concreted over between 2009 and 2022 in the 40 municipalities of the wider Saint-Omer area – the zone the most affected – was used for commercial activity, against 62.5% (around 510 hectares or 1,260 acres) for housing.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
A sign of the mounting tension over the many planned developments has been the creation of a new association; the aim of 'Stop Inondations' is to gradually draw up a list of planning developments that pose a problem. There is also a petition calling for the majority of planning permissions to be put on hold while they are re-examined.
Some local councils have already got the message. At Lumbres, a small town of 3,700 inhabitants in the heart of the flood risk zone, plans for 42 homes were being drawn up on the site of a former supermarket. The plans, which were well advanced, were dropped in the end because of the flood risk. “In this case no funding had been secured,” which helped its cancellation, explained the council.
Fundamental issue
But that is not the case everywhere. “In fact, I have the impression that the floods have changed nothing, and even that everything is accelerating before it's no longer possible to build,” says Noël Bodelle from Wizerne, in a reference to the objectives set by legislation on net zero for artificial surfaces, a law known as ZAN. This law is seeking to achieve net zero in built-on surfaces by 2050 and imposes an obligation to cut such concreting over by half between now and 2031.
Jean Schepman, the former socialist vice-president of the council for the neighbouring département of Nord, who has long campaigned on issues of over-urbanisation, takes the same view. “People are rushing to get the house with a garden that they all want. Before the floods a mayor who developed a housing estate saw the plots go in three days,” says the former councillor, who is now proud of the 'Local Cassandra' nickname he acquired in the past because of his stance against the spread of built-up areas.
“They definitely see that the risk is real but they're playing for time. We've reached the point of no-return,” says Jean Schepman talking of residents whom he describes as “lost, who don't want to accept that it could be too late, who want to catch their breath after all these catastrophes”. He says it is “difficult” for local mayors to stand in the way of plans for a new house and to stop people getting onto the property ladder.
“The demand for detached houses is not going down,” confirms Françoise Rossignol, mayor of Dainville and secretary general of the Pas-de-Calais branch of the national organisation for mayors, the Association des Maires de France (AMF). “How can [my community] remain attractive without urban creep?” she asks. “The economic model that would allow one to regulate the issue doesn't exist,” she says, referring to an approach that would allow curbs on the “recklessness of some elected representatives, which has certainly existed”.
“When you have exceptional events, that changes everyone's thinking, including among mayors,” says the secretary general of the Pas-de-Calais branch of AMF. “When there's such trauma it's clear that the review of urban planning documents is going to be a long and difficult process.”
Others, however, do not see any prospect of change. Large developments involving dozens of housing estates have not been paused. And there are many re-industrialisation plans on the horizon, for example at Dunkirk, which has ambitions to become a “battery valley” as part of the electrification of the economy. In this context several gigafactories are due to be set up, creating a total of 16,000 direct jobs between now and 2030, industrialists promise.
Simon Roussel, a former candidate in Parliamentary elections for the Pas-de-Calais, who has campaigned “for a long time” against the widespread concreting over of the countryside, has a sense of foreboding. “These people will have to be housed,” he says, referring to the new jobs being created. “And, in reality, I have the impression that there's a frenzy, that everyone wants their share of the development cake in Dunkirk.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter