Landslides | The Bay remains on its guard

(La Baie) After seeing their neighbors evacuated as a precaution, perhaps for months, residents of the perimeter established around the landslide in the borough of La Baie, in Saguenay, fear that they will also have to pack their boxes.

Vincent Larin
The Press

“Me, I sleep badly”, immediately admits Marie Raymond, resident of 7^e Ave. Two houses away from her house, a high fence separates the entrance from her neighbours.

On the one hand, the elderly and blind lady who lived there was evacuated on the evening of last Saturday, on the other, the residents took no risk and left on their own. Two blocks away, the source of their concerns: a huge landslide, which has appeared little by little in recent weeks, where a shed and an above-ground swimming pool float.

“We wonder why, two houses away, they have to leave, but not us? It’s the same mound, however,” continues Marie Raymond. “We were told that they had evacuated more than necessary,” she says, as if to reassure herself.

In fact, 53 homes were evacuated last Saturday evening in the La Baie sector, in Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean. Its approximately 200 residents were told they had until 7 a.m. the next day to vacate the premises, after which they could no longer set foot there, said the sister of one of the evacuees, Louise De La Durantaye.

“At that time, there were no stores open, we had no boxes. We had time to take out 75% of the things in the house. Luckily, we had six cars and a trailer closed, since she had just moved her son,” she recalls.

These evacuations were then added to the 21 decreed last week, following the collapse of an entire house already emptied in a preventive manner in April.

In Saguenay, everyone remembers the tragedy that occurred in 1971 in the neighboring village of Saint-Jean-Vianney, where 42 houses and the lives of 31 people were swept away by a landslide.

Review the scope

Monday evening, when adopting a resolution at the municipal council to ask Quebec to extend the state of emergency in Saguenay, the mayor Julie Dufour rightly referred to the learnings of this sad drama.

“These 31 deaths have now saved 200 people. […] They are alive, we kept our world, ”she said. But significant work remains to be done to determine the next steps for the evacuated sector.

The City of Saguenay hopes to be able to reduce the perimeter to allow some victims to return to their homes. “But I’m not making any promises today,” warned the director of the Fire Department and emergency measures coordinator, Carol Girard.

All day Monday, experts from the Ministry of Transport conducted soil analyzes using the piezocone, a tool used to transmit live results, in an attempt to understand the source of the landslide.

In the meantime, the authorities have erected two impressive mounds of sand at the entrance to the sector, in the hope of holding back a potential flow.

However, the work must be done carefully, in stages, while the possibility of another collapse is not calculated in “if”, but in “when”, according to Mayor Julie Dufour.

The heavy rains of recent times, which have reached nearly three times the seasonal average, could partly explain the landslide that occurred in La Baie, estimates the holder of the Canada Research Chair in forecasting and prevention of risks related to hydrogeotechnical hazards, Ali Saeidi.

The Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region has in several places a “clayey soil, very specific to Quebec and the Scandinavian countries”, which is “extremely sensitive”, says the one who also teaches at the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi ( UQAC).

But “without the analysis data, we won’t really be able to say much if the ground is stable. Even with these data, it is a very complex phenomenon and we will not be able to say 100% “if other slips are possible, he explains.

Offsets

Shortly before announcing that he would be visiting La Baie on Wednesday, the Premier of Quebec, François Legault, indicated that he would consider the possibility of improving the compensation offered to the victims.

For the moment, the compensation offered to citizens by Quebec in the context of such dramas amounts to approximately $260,000, he detailed during a press briefing in Sherbrooke, in the Eastern Townships.

According to the mayoress of Saguenay, Julie Dufour, this compensation is far from sufficient, just like the $20 given each day to the victims for housing and food, an “amount that does not make sense”. She claims for the victims the full reimbursement of the market value of their houses and all of their bills to relocate.