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An unusual form of pollution has residents along France’s exclusive Cote D’Azur up in arms. It’s noise pollution from helicopters. The aircraft crisscross the sky all day long in summertime, ferrying about the wealthiest visitors. For years now local authorities have demanding stricter controls for helicopters and they may soon get them. The World’s Gerry Hadden reports from Saint Tropez. (Photo: Gerry Hadden)
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DAVID BARON: Cooling and heating aren’t the issue in an exclusive French vacation spot. People in the Cote D’Azur are up in arms over noise pollution. All day long during the summer, helicopters transport wealthy visitors. And the noise is nearly constant. For years now, local authorities have been demanding stricter controls on the helicopters. And as The World’s Gerry Hadden reports, they may soon get them.
GERRY HADDEN: Wealthy jet-setters come to St Tropez for this. The exclusive beaches. The exclusive, quiet beaches. But increasingly, over the past several years, what they hear is this. On a recent sunny morning the calm is shattered by the blades of a low flying helicopter. It passes straight over the beach and lands on a helipad on a nearby hillside on someone’s front lawn. For some of the Cote D’Azur’s well-to-do, private helicopters are the way to move about. You can forget the Riviera’s infamous traffic as you whirl about at whim. The concept is wonderful, says local resident Matthias Bittner. The problem is the frequency of the flights. He says as the number of super-rich visitors has gone up, St. Tropez’s heli-traffic has gotten hellish.
MATTHIAS BITTNER: It’s one heli every five minutes basically, 5 to 10 minutes.
HADDEN: Bittner sits with his wife at the bar of the exclusive beach club, Club Cinquante-cinq. The noise down here is bad, he says. But up at his house in the nearby hills it’s even worse. Bittner’s next-door neighbor has a helipad. Just the evening before, he says, a chopper swooped in, wrecking cocktail hour.
BITTNER: And that guy, basically, in the evening after 7, started 2 times. One time to show family because he made a tour of the area where you can hear all the time. Second time he went shopping, I think. So, basically, we had 4 helicopters between 7 and 8. It was really a nuisance.
HADDEN: To combat growing discontent local authorities have banned early morning and late-night flights and set minimum helicopter altitudes. But Patrice du Colmo, the owner of the Club Cinquante-cinq, says the restrictions haven’t worked.
FRENCH SPEAKING
HADDEN: Basically, he says, we have a problem of respect. The pilots must respect the residents here. And that’s not always the case. They go too far. Much of the noise begins here at an airstrip in Grimaud, about half an hour into the hills behind St. Tropez. Rich vacationers land here in their jets, then take heli-taxis to their homes. They leave every ten minutes.
FRENCH SPEAKING
HADDEN: As a huge blue helicopter swoops off towards the coast, one man, waiting with his daughter, says the helicopter service is fast, very fast. The helicopter companies here refused to comment. But their booming business is at a crossroads. St. Tropez and nearby communities have banded together to demand a central heliport, offshore. That would mean no more door-to-door service. You’d land at sea, take a boat to shore, then drive home like everyone else. The regional government is now considering the plan, but Club Cinquante-cinq owner Patrice du Colmo says he has a better idea. Equip every private helicopter with a hook on its underside. A hook capable of carrying thousands of gallons of water. When all too frequent summer forest fires start, he says, all helicopters in the air would be obliged to help put them out.
FRENCH SPEAKING
HADDEN: He says if there’s a forest fire near your house and you see the same helicopter that was annoying you 15 minutes earlier arriving with water to save you, the whirlybird is now your friend. This plan is actually on the table too, and has the support of the local fire department, du Colmo says. But as the debate goes on, there’s at least one guy in St. Tropez who isn’t shedding tears over his neighbors’ supposedly lost paradise. It’s Oscar the photographer. Oscar trods the beach snapping portraits of vacationers.
FRENCH SPEAKING
HADDEN: He says the people here complain all the time. If the big yachts and the private jets went away, they’d complain. It’s the same with the helicopters flying villa to villa. Without them, he says, this wouldn’t be St. Tropez. For The World I’m Gerry Hadden, St. Tropez, France.
BARON: You can see Gerry Hadden’s photos from St. Tropez at TheWorld.org. This is PRI.
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