Strike chaosbrings fearsover Frenchfuel supplies

Airlines were told to cut back their flights into the country drastically as the next round of protests over plans to raise the retirement age swing into action.

Yesterday oil workers defied a government demand to get back to work amid the beginnings of panic buying at filling stations by motorists fearing diesel and petrol shortages.

Some reports said more than 1,000 filling stations, about a quarter of the total, had run out.

Aircrew on short-haul flights from other European countries were warned to carry enough fuel for their return journeys.

Strikers have blockaded a dozen refineries and numerous oil depots in the last week as part of the widespread protests over President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to raise the retirement age to 62, which the French Senate will debate tomorrow.

They set piles of tyres on fire in front of a refinery at Grandpuits, east of Paris, after being hit with a legal order to reopen it.

Others formed a human chain to prevent the refinery workers from entering the plant.

Dozens of oil tankers remained stuck in the Mediterranean, anchored outside Marseilles’s two oil ports, where workers have been on strike for more than three weeks, to protest a planned port reform as well as the retirement changes.

The government opened a crisis co-ordination centre in the Interior Ministry, focusing on the conflict in the oil sector.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon has pledged to do what is necessary to prevent fuel shortages, saying the government will not allow them to hurt the economy. The head of France’s petroleum industry body said reserves were “enough to keep us going for a few weeks”.

Jean-Louis Schilansky, president of the Petrol Industries Association, warned however that if the strikers continued to block fuel depots and if the nation’s truckers joined the movement, “then we will have a very big problem”.

Truckers did take part in yesterday’s action, staging organised slowdowns forcing traffic to drive at a snail’s pace on the main road between Paris and the northern city of Lille.

In Paris students from Lycee Joliot Curie in the suburb of Nanterre tried to blockade their school, with about 100 facing off against police, who responded with rubber bullets. In all, 261 schools were closed.