Friday on Vénéona stream of Isère, it wiped out part of the hamlet of La Bérardelocated at 1,727 meters above sea level in the municipality of Saint-Christophe-en-Oisansin the heart of the Écrins massif.
The photos and videos arriving from the valley show houses buried and roads destroyed and they strike the many climbers, mountaineers and mountain enthusiasts who consider those areas a true mecca.
For La Bérarde, the situation is catastrophic: an aerial reconnaissance carried out on Saturday 22 June showed that the new bed of the Étançons stream has devastated the center of the town, sweeping away several houses and destroying the church. Faced with such an apocalyptic landscape, it is a consolation to know that the prompt intervention of the Alpine rescue team, by land and by air, allowed the immediate evacuation of the dangerous areas and ensured that there were no injured or missing people.
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Carrying out a rescue operation of this magnitude required numerous round trips made by four helicopters. Friday evening, all those affected were welcomed in the tourist resort of Les Deux-Alpes, hosted in the city’s Palais des Sports, about ten kilometers as the crow flies from La Bérarde.
It is a disaster caused by copious rainfall, but not only that, second Guy Vernet, president of the Community of Municipalities of Oisans: “We talked a lot about rain, but with global warming the snow is melting enormously and this makes things worse – he underlines – melting snow increases the size of streams and contributes to these devastating floods“.
The Écrins National Park released a statement to define the extent of the problem: “The situation in the mountain range is currently very complicated, with many access roads blocked. In Vénéon, the hamlet of La Bérarde is flooded; all the inhabitants of the village and the shelters of Châtelleret, Carrelet and Temple Écrins are evacuated by air. Road access to Saint-Christophe-en-Oisans and La Bérarde is also impossible until further notice. The situation is the same in Valgaudemar, Champsaur and Chaumette. In the Briançonnais area, access to the Petit Tabuc and Grand Tabuc valleys is impossible: the slopes were washed away and the local authority banned motorized and pedestrian traffic in these two valleys“.
Furthermore, local authorities have issued ordinances ban on access to the Haut Vénéon-La Bérarde disaster area due to the risks for people (buildings that risk collapsing, impossibility of crossing streams, etc.).
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Mountains are on the front lines of climate change: if before it was only the scientific reports that told us, now there are also the photos and videos that periodically invade the homes of our social networks. More intense rainfall is increasing the risk of floods and landslides, with clear and dramatic effects, and the future will hold increasingly complex situations for us to manage.
Valerie Paumierfounder of the association Resilience Mountainswhich deals with the protection of the mountain environment and the disclosure of the impacts of climate change on it: “If we try to postpone mitigation too long – by mitigation we mean the measures necessary to address the underlying problem, slowing down or stopping the increase in fossil fuel emissions, which risk causing an irreversible and catastrophic increase in global temperature – we will no longer be able to talk about adaptation. Investors will no longer have to finance projects in mountain areas. If some say that without skiing everything in the mountains is over , it is certain that without a transformation of the models, everything will be finished even more quickly. The mountain villages are the furthest in terms of time and kilometers for food supplies and relief.”.
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