they tell of the hours of struggle to bring the Monfort back to his bed

A week after the bad weather which hit Isère, the “stream” of Montfort, in Lumbin, is peacefully following its course. We can hear the background noise of water flowing downstream. “Wednesday (the 29th, editor’s note) and the following night it was another melody! launches Franck Strizzolo, river technician at SYMBHI, the Mixed Syndicate of hydraulic basins of Isère, and responsible for the sector.You could no longer hear anything with the noise of the machines and the pebbles which tumbled down. “

Water pushes a 25 ton excavator

He and his colleagues did not count their hours, when Fabien Sommard, manager of the company “Le Noyer Vert” in Tencin called back his employees who had gone on leave. He mobilized seven excavators. “The night has been tense! let go of the thirty-something. The water pushed us machines; a large 25-ton excavator was shifted five meters when a large wave came in behind the funicular. ”

From the departure station of the funicular, there are still the walls and the roof. But the interior is filled with rubble pushed by the waters. The parking lot is nothing but a field of mud and stones shaped by the comings and goings of large construction machinery. It is estimated that the torrent carried 10,000 cubic meters of rubble. The work of SYMBHI technicians, service providers and agents from the municipality of Lumbin have made it possible to identify 4,000. There are still several weeks before cleaning, clearing, and securing the site. But at least the stream has returned to its bed.

“Dantesque”

He was out at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, December 29. Three hours later, he was channeled, recalls Daniel Verdeil. “Once he was in his bed we managed to keep him there until the end of the flood, notes the deputy director of SYMBHI. And there it was an endless struggle, the game of cat and mouse with the torrent : the level rose in one place, we brought a shovel, we had a truck dumped to make a fence, and as soon as we had finished it threatened to overflow in another place … so we moved the machines. It was dark, it was raining, we could see 10 meters away, there were machines everywhere. It was a bit daunting. ”

He and his agents were busy taming the torrent while with the rubble, the firefighters erected hillocks to protect the houses located below. A titanic work which made it possible to limit the damage, for the most part, to the funicular installations – even if around ten homes were affected (gardens and flooded cellars).