Paul-Henri Bourrelier was the chairman of the French office for evaluating public policies aimed at preventing natural disasters. Readers will therefore understand why he is, quite rightly, indignant about the different amount of attention paid to technological as against natural risks, and that he strongly criticizes the failures adequately to predict and therefore to prevent them, not to mention the perverse effects of the French system of compensation for damage.
As a close observer of a matter that the public authorities in France keep firmly under wraps, he shares with us here his thoughts about the floods, storms and the oil slick that hit France on the eve of the year 2000 -though there was no millennium bug after all.
Cet article fait partie de la revue Futuribles n° 251, mars 2000
