Chapel cut in two, houses gutted: residents of the Alpine hamlet of La Bérarde, victim a week ago of a gigantic torrential lava flow, were left speechless on Friday when they returned to collect their belongings.
“I can’t even find the vocabulary to express myself anymore. Deep dismay, my arms are hanging loose,” says Jacky Trignat, a volunteer from the French Federation of French Alpine Clubs (FFCAM), who came to inspect the state of the chalet. which welcomed its members to La Bérarde.
Perched in a narrow valley at an altitude of 1,700 metres in the high mountain range of the Ecrins, between Isère and Hautes-Alpes and nicknamed “The Mecca of mountaineers”, the small village suffered the full force of an exceptional flood of the Vénéon River on the night of 20 to 21 June.
At the entrance to what was the village, the road turned into a torrent and flows of stones, mud and mixed debris descended an entire section of the mountain, devastating or burying part of the houses in the process.
Here, a completely collapsed wall reveals the interior of a kitchen.
Further on, a leaning lamppost emerges from an immense trail of large stones rolled by the water.
Of the hundred buildings listed by the firefighters, six were simply swallowed up by the scree or carried away by the current. Others, on the contrary, are intact.
The causes of the disaster have not yet been scientifically established, but in the opinion of specialists, this unprecedented phenomenon was probably caused by the combination of heavy rains, the melting of large stocks of snow and the collapse of a vast pocket of glacial water at altitude against a backdrop of global warming.
– “Disaster” –
Around a hundred people were able to be evacuated urgently by helicopter from La Bérarde during the night. To date, no casualties have been reported according to the Isère prefecture, which coordinated the operations with the help of mountain rescue services and has been sealing off the area since then.
On Friday, around forty of these residents returned as part of a strictly supervised operation to avoid any accident on the disrupted site.
“The main structure is intact, but inside it’s a real disaster. The kitchens are unusable, the furniture is all below par,” sighs Jacky Trignat.
“It’s a page that is turning, an era that is ending. Those who are still skeptical about global warming, we should organize convoys to La Bérarde to convince them,” he laments.
For him, the most poignant “symbol” of the disaster is the old chapel in the centre of the hamlet, left “gutted” by the lava, of which only half of the walls remain under an intact but precariously balanced roof.
– “Millions of cubic meters” –
Olivier Bruguet, firefighter section head in charge of building risks, is not much more optimistic about the future of the small church: he considers it “likely that in the next flood, following a storm or melting significant snowfall, there is a collapse of the entire remaining part of the chapel.
To respond to the emergency, firefighters used the same risk assessment techniques as during earthquakes with “a color code that responds to a level of danger” for each building, he explains.
“In front of me, there are millions of cubic metres of stones with heights ranging from 6 to 10 metres which have completely changed the landscape,” he notes, pointing to the immense flow coming from the high valleys.
The department of Isère announced on Friday the creation of an emergency aid fund to which it has already contributed 5 million euros. Several other initiatives and prize pools have also been launched in recent days to help the residents of the valley.
On Thursday, the president of the Ecrins National Park Arnaud Murgia, also mayor of Briançon, called for help from the State in the face of this “ecological, climatic and above all human disaster”.
