An entire section of mountain falls away, dragging down everything in its path. A “large-scale rockslide” occurred along a departmental road in La Rivière, in Isère, late Thursday afternoon, announced the department prefecture, which did not report any casualties in its initial reports.
Around fifty firefighters are mobilized, and “five dog teams are present on site looking for potential victims,” specifies the prefecture in a press release providing an update on the situation at 10 p.m. “A mini-mountain crossed the departmental road,” said the mayor of La Rivière Raymond Rolland, quoted by France Bleu Isère, specifying that there were no homes in the area of the landslide, which had place around 7 p.m.
A video published on the France Bleu Isère website shows an entire section of cliff collapsing, and a man saying “the mountain has fallen”. “What we experienced was a landslide measuring several tens of thousands of cubic meters, which started in an area with a few stones falling. Today, we cannot explain this phenomenon.
The volume of materials that fell from the slopes of the mountain is not precisely known, but it already amounts to several thousand cubic meters, according to Dauphiné Libéré. According to some rescuers who went to the site, cited by France Bleu, “the pile of rubble reached 20 meters in places”.
Electricity was cut off in several neighborhoods in the municipalities of Saint-Gervais and Vinay. The prefecture has activated a crisis unit, and is calling for people to avoid the area.
