Cervinia after the bad weather, the drama of the flood: a tide of mud on summer skiing

Breuil Cervinia (Aosta) — In mid-morning Carlo puts down the shovel for a moment. He puts his hands on his hips and examines the mountain of 400 ski boots piled up at the door of his shop: “They need to be thrown away,” sighs Carlo Comé, 67, the owner of the Cervinia 2001 ski rental shop. “I still have to take out a thousand skis and the machine to trim the edges: everything is destroyed. On Sunday there was a meter and a half of water in the warehouse.” Now there are 20 centimeters of mud that a chain of volunteers are hauling out in buckets.

It’s a scene that’s all the same, it’s repeated in front of the 28 commercial businesses brought to their knees by the flood that on Sunday, at two in the morning, swept away Cervinia, causing incalculable damage to 12 bars, restaurants and hotels, 11 shops, two ski schools, a real estate agency, the parapharmacy, the tobacconist. The water came out of the Marmore riverbed at the height of the baby ski lifts in via Jean Bich, it overtook the banks that protect via Carrel, the main street of Cervinia and swept away everything. Now there’s an enormous mudslide.

Laura Navillod, the owner of the guest house Le Samovar is alive by a miracle. “I live upstairs, on Saturday night my neighbor woke me up, I ran to the place – recalls the owner of the café opened in 1991 – the water broke the glass door, it overwhelmed me”. Navillod manages to cling “to a piece of furniture that was floating in the living room – she reconstructs – so I kept my head above water: the piece of furniture protected me, it acted as a dam”.

This is not an exaggeration. Le Samovar is the shop furthest down the Corso Carrel, from where the water overflowed the banks. The sports shop of Roberta Manzetti, 42, is right in front of the blown-up bridge in the center of town: “On Sunday there were 70 centimeters of water in the street, the current broke through the banks and the torrent entered my shop,” she assures, “I have 200 thousand euros worth of sportswear in the basement, it’s all ready to be thrown away.” The concern is not only for the lost goods: “In the cellars there are the electricity meters, the boiler that serves the entire building,” she says, “we still have a meter and a half of mud: until we manage to remove all this earth I won’t have electricity in my house: I live on the floor above, with two little girls aged six and nine.”

The positive note is the smiles of the citizens who have mobilized to help the businessmen in difficulty. The owner of a construction company in the area has made available his machinery, two bobcats, a truck, to clean Cervinia from the avalanche of debris.

Alessandro Serra, 38, was already at the controls of the excavator on Saturday night: “I ran out into the street at one o’clock, it was hell,” he says, “when the flood invaded the road I used the mechanical shovel to break down the banks and make the stream return to its bed.” But the damage was done. Now the people of Cervinia are working to get back on their feet. “We are in constant contact with the governor of the Aosta Valley, Cervinia is not closed, tell that to the tourists,” repeats the young mayor Elisa Cicco, 40, “we will return to normal. It is an extraordinary event: our elderly have no memory of a similar disaster in the last 100 years.”

Mountain people don’t give up easily. So Andrea Verdese, 46, has gone from being a chef to a truck driver to help others. “Each of us does what we can,” he emphasizes, “I’m a chef in Valtournenche but I have a special license. I’ve been here since 7:30 in the morning, I drive the truck until 7:00 p.m., then I go to work in the kitchen.” If “we don’t help each other, we won’t get out of this,” Verdese accuses, “we haven’t seen the institutions yet.” And in these conditions, at least for the summer season, even tourists risk becoming a mirage.