In Saint-Raphaël, major cleaning of Agay bay polluted by the 2019 floods

It’s a miraculous catch that began in the harbor of Agay, in Saint-Raphaël, in the Var. Waste of all kinds, washed up on the sand several meters deep, which had been lying there since 2019, carried by the flooding of the Agay River. There would be at least sixty tons. “We didn’t expect there to be so many. During the preparatory phase of the site, we realized that there was still a very large volume“, emphasizes Maurin Ballestra, the manager of the company in charge of the works.

We are not talking about conventional waste, those we are used to finding on our coasts, such as plastic, but macro-waste from campsites ravaged by the power of the flooding river. And in particular whole mobile homes taken to the sea! Frames, walls, doors and windows, but also everything he had inside, toilets, appliances, bedding …

The removal technique is intended to be gentle. No question of dragging this waste to the beach by scraping the bottom. Scuba divers delicately extract the waste from the sand using balloons, then a crane hoists them onto the barge at the surface. Objective of this operation, to protect as much as possible the Posidonia meadows which constitute the major ecosystem of the Mediterranean. They play a very important role in the protection of coasts against erosion and also for the survival of many organisms, animals and plants, which find in the seagrass beds protection and nourishment.

And there was an emergency in this bay, partly classified as a Natura 2000 zone. “These wastes had to be removed because they were not going to be taken up by nature and would have remained as they are even if there were already small crabs that had nested on the remains of the mobile homes. It was important to give this space back to the Posidonia herbarium and give it something to develop.“, specifies Sylvie Blanc, deputy mayor of Saint-Raphaël. The site should last three weeks.