On Thursday afternoon, in La Rivière, a “large-scale rock slide” occurred on a road belonging to the department, the department prefecture did not report any casualties in its initial reports.
No residence
“At this stage of the investigation, there is nothing to indicate a potential victim. No missing persons have been reported,” the prefecture said in an update on the situation at 11:00 p.m. after Prefect Louis Laugier visited the site.
The search for possible buried victims was called off for the night “given the instability of the area and the risk of another accident in the dark.”
“Given the scale of the area to be covered and as a precautionary measure,” they should continue on Friday morning “after an assessment of residual geological risks,” the prefecture added.
About fifty firefighters were mobilized and five dog teams went to the area to help with the search.
According to an interview with Raymond Rolland, mayor of La Riviere Dauphine Liberé The slide that happened around 7 p.m. has no house on the axis.
“What we experienced was a landslide of several tens of thousands of cubic meters that started in the area where a few stones fell. Today we cannot explain this phenomenon. “There’s a quarry next to it,” said Bernard Perazio, vice-president for roads of the Isère departmental council, when questioned at the scene of the disaster. “There’s a walnut tree, no house,” he says.
Difficult quests
The rock pile cut off the 1,532 management road below the quarry for more than several hundred meters, according to the prefecture. Along the northern flanks of the Vercors, the departmental road connecting the urban area of Drôme and Grenoble intersects at junctions RD45 in the north and RD518 in the south.
It’s a busy road and the search has been difficult because “the drift has not stabilized,” said Bernard Perazio, who said he was worried about “booking 7,000 cars a day.”
In the municipalities of Saint-Gervais and Vinay, electricity was cut in several neighborhoods. The prefecture has launched a crisis unit.
video posted by Dauphine Liberé shows a whole section of the cliff collapsing and a man saying “the mountain has fallen”.