The mobilization continued on Sunday against the construction site of a water reserve intended for agricultural irrigation in Sainte-Soline (Deux-Sèvres), with the construction of watchtowers and the ransacking of a pipe, in the day after a demonstration and violent clashes with the police.

“There are around 2,000 people left on the site, I remind you that the demonstration remains prohibited, so that any act aimed at trying again to enter the site of the reserve will again be ruled out”, declared in the morning on franceinfo the prefect of the department, Emmanuelle Dubée.

"Knock down one of the six arms of the octopus"

There was no new intrusion attempt in the end but, in the afternoon, an action of "civil disobedience" according to the opponents of the project: hooded activists, in overalls and equipped with a grinder, shovels and pickaxes, severed one of the pipes supposed to supply the future reserve, according to them.

“We have just dropped one of the six arms of the octopus”, welcomed Julien Le Guet, spokesperson for the anti-basins collective, nickname given to these detentions by their detractors.

A police helicopter flew over the scene but the police did not intervene.

On Saturday, several thousand people (4,000 according to the authorities, 7,000 according to the organizers) gathered in Sainte-Soline, east of Niort, to protest.

Violent clashes erupted with the 1,500 gendarmes mobilized when opponents of the project wanted to enter the site, which was forbidden to access.

Some of them succeeded before being repelled.

"Water grabbing"

About sixty gendarmes according to the Ministry of the Interior, one of whom was hospitalized, and about fifty demonstrators according to the organizers of the demonstration, five of whom were hospitalized, were injured in this violence attributed by the prefecture of the department to radical militants .

The future reserve intended for irrigation, with a capacity of around 650,000 cubic meters, the equivalent of 260 Olympic swimming pools, is denounced by its detractors as a "grabbing of water" by the agro-industry, doubled of an ecological aberration at a time of global warming and repeated droughts.

Opponents of the project want to register their actions in the long term, the private land they occupy, loaned by a farmer, being available until mid-May.

“This will be our basis for the next actions against the site if it were to restart.

ZAD or not ZAD, it will be in these terms, ”assured Julien Le Guet.

Reduce water withdrawals

Watchtowers were built on the site on Sunday.

"Today, we are building a lookout, a lookout to anchor the fight on this ground, to be able to see the enemy coming," added David, a 43-year-old peasant baker who requested anonymity, taking part in the building a wooden tower.

Sainte-Soline is the second of a project of 16 substitution reserves developed four years ago by a group of 400 farmers to reduce their water withdrawals during the summer, thanks to the pumping of surface water tables in winter.

Access to this storage is conditional on the adoption of practices that are more respectful of the environment, but none of the beneficiaries of the first deduction has committed, for the time being, to reducing their use of pesticides.

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