the essential
Primary school students discovered Écocène, an environmental education association based in Pau.
Éocène is an environmental education association based in Pau for twenty-two years. She has been leading flood risk awareness projects for five years, first for the city of Pau, then the Pau Béarn Pyrénées conurbation, and, for two years, for the SMBGP Syndicate (Syndicat Mixte du Bassin of the Gave de Pau).
The commune of Lamarque-Pontacq joins this union through the CATLP (Communauté Agglomération Tarbes Lourdes Pyrénées) because the Ousse stream and its tributaries cross the village.
An activity was organized by Marie and Julie for cycle 3 from CE2 to CM2. The themes were addressed in the form of games thanks to an animated model representing the Gave de Pau watershed with distribution to schoolchildren of the fun booklet “Floods, are they giving you?”. Three sessions are scheduled on flooding in the Gave de Pau watershed, then on how to protect yourself from flooding, and finally towards a culture of flood risk.
The Lamarque-Pontacq school is the first in the upstream catchment area of the Gave de Pau to benefit from this awareness-raising. The commune of Lamarque-Pontacq and its school would like to thank the SMBGP Union which enabled the intervention of Ecocene facilitators, Marie and Julie.
Pontacq sur l’Osse…
The Ousse is indeed the river par excellence of Pontacq, which could be called Pontacq-sur-l'Oousse. It has its source in the Hautes-Pyrénées, in the triangle formed by Lourdes, Poueyferré and Barvrai. It names, near the source, a house, as indicated on a map of the General Staff which, a little higher, distorts its name in the form Ous R. After a course of approximately 8 km of more modest, yet sufficient to operate a few small mills, it enters the territory of Pontacq from the south, bathes the town where it branches out and after 4 km, exits from the north to enter the territory of Barzun. 30 km from its source it joins the Gave at Pau. It is torrential throughout its course, scarce, dry up but also often overflows. The local tributaries of the Ousse are the Badé, the Arriu, the Barade, the Sausset, the Lourou…
