Flood control on the Loire

Early last year, on a different blog, I had a post about a face-off over a dike built along a stretch of the Loire River at Bas-en-Basset in the Haute-Loire.  You can read about it here and more here.  The next installment in the conflict is to take place next week, on 15 January, when the mayor of Bas-en-Basset, Joseph Chapuis, appears in court in Le Puy.  He's charged with failing to implement a prefecture order to dismantle the dike.  Last Saturday, 5 January, several hundred people gathered near the structure to show support for the mayor.  Organizers of the event, the Collective du Bon Sens ("Good Sense Collective") said they also had support from 4,000 petition signatures.

Loire River at Bas-en-Basset.  By Richard Mounts, 2011

 In 2011, the mayor took advantage of an impromptu offer of some clay-rich soil being excavated from a nearby construction site.  He accepted and quickly put city crews to work using the soil to build up the embankment along about a one-kilometer stretch where the river runs through the city.  It's just at this point where the city maintains a campground and recreation area with a swimming pool, tennis courts and playing fields.  For a long time, the facilities have drawn families from Saint-Etienne and surrounding areas for summer vacations and weekend get-aways.  The 496 campground spaces largely accommodate camper vans, but over the years a good many permanent structures have been added -- places to store things, or covered porches next to parking spaces.  The grounds had been flooded in 2008 and the mayor likely thought the work along the river would protect against a recurrence.

Dike and campground.  By Richard Mounts, 2011

Campground and amenities.  By Richard Mounts, 2011

The problem is that the work was done without official approval.  The mayor has argued it wasn't needed because they were simply fixing up existing protections.  Public agencies like the ONEMA (Office national de l'eau et des milieux aquatiques) and the prefecture disagreed; they viewed the dike as an illegal flood-control measure.  This is significant because, since the mid-1990s, it has been public policy to manage the threat of flooding along the Loire, not by building dams and dikes, but by preventing development in floodplain areas.  A five-year conflict over construction of a flood-control dam at a site south of Le Puy (Serre-de-la-Fare) was finally resolved with a decision not to build and to adopt this new policy.  In this part of the upper Loire Valley, this history is still fresh.  And the two sides in that conflict tend to reemerge at times like this.