“All this space that you see, it was a condominium with small adjoining, individual houses, and there were about twenty dwellings, remembers Laurent Lebéssous, who returns there like a pilgrimage. They were destroyed in March, it’s very recent “, continues this former resident of the Hamlet de La Brague, located at the foot of the village from Biot.
A few days before the opening of the COP26, which will take place from November 1 to 12 in Glasgow, Scotland, and after the alarming forecasts by IPCC scientists on the climate, franceinfo visited this municipality in the Alpes-Maritimes which has decided to revisit its urban development ambitions to face climate challenges. A little more than five years after the centennial flood of the Brague in October 2015, the houses which had been built in this small basin, encroaching on the bed of a seemingly harmless river, were razed to make way for a vacant lot on which only a few rubble remains today.
In total, Jean-Pierre Dermit, the mayor of Biot, bought 24 houses that were destroyed, and blocked nearly a thousand buildings. “We go back in time so that nature can regain its rights, because nature also participates in the fight against floods”, he explains. “We cannot say no to development, but today in my town I put a brake on development”, assumes the mayor.
“My priority is to make people safe before I can dream of growth and economic development.”
Jean-Pierre Dermit, mayor of Biotto franceinfo
This type of project comes at a price. The operation cost 14 million euros. It was made possible by support from the state disaster fund. Overall, residents were relieved to be able to leave this area.
The deadly floods of 2015 had mourned a wider sector in the department and this reconquest of nature now exceeds the town of Biot. The urban community of Sophia-Antipolis has thus launched a project which involves the purchase and destruction of houses at risk and the economic reconversion of the campsites and merry-go-rounds which occupy a large area of this plain which leads to the edge of the river. sea.
This transition will take time, but the political will is there. “Everyone really agrees that we are not fighting against nature, assures Valérie Emphoux, in charge of the management of aquatic environments in the urban community. We must accompany her and restore her rights, which she takes back anyway on her own, and her balance. “ After the 2015 flood, four campsites were closed by the prefecture. And the coastal conservatory, which is associated with this renaturation project, could buy around fifty hectares.
This policy of urban effacement is not specific to these communes in the Alpes-Maritimes. Emma Haziza is a hydrologist, president and founder of the Mayane agency. She explains that in ten years, a revolution has started. “For a very long time, we remained focused on the fact that only our capacity to counter the hazard was the best solution. We really stayed on a very Napoleonic image that said: make me put these waters in their bed. , we built dams, dikes, and we really tried to control where the water would go “, she explains.
“From the years 2005-2010, we completely changed our focus and we said to ourselves that in the end we were not able to fight against nature, and that we had to work on the issues themselves. same. “
Emma Haziza, hydrologistto franceinfo
Work on the issues, that is, destroy or protect houses, and build differently. In Romorantin for example, in the department of Loir-et-Cher, a district was designed to float. An idea competition was even launched by the Ministry of Ecological Transition to further advance on solutions. Because according to specialists, we are at all of this adaptation work.