Twenty-nine dead overnight in a village of a few hundred souls. Ten years later, La Faute-sur-Mer (Vendée) is far from having healed the wounds of storm Xynthia but has regained its air of a seaside resort.
"On Saturday evening, the weather was magnificent until 11:00 p.m., and it was very soon after," recalls Laurent Roblet, a fisherman, who has since rebuilt his life a stone's throw from the family home flooded by 1.65 meter of water. “The sea continued to rise until 5.30 am I believe. In fact it went up from minute to minute, it was impressive, nobody had ever seen that " , continues the young 56 year old pensioner who was one of the first to discover the extent of the damage at dawn, sailing in a boat in the subdivision where the survivors have been waiting cold for hours.
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"What they needed was to know that there were still people living around them," still remembers Laurent, who discovered two corpses during this fatal morning.
Because yes, in its wake, the nightmare Xinthia - whose mere mention still makes the hairs of many locals stand on end - claimed the lives of 29 people on the peninsula. The youngest of the victims was a two-year-old boy, most of them elderly people trapped by the storm that crossed the dikes and created a huge water retention in the neighborhood, where 600 houses were deconstructed after Xynthia.
A village transformed forever
However, "it was not a storm of unprecedented magnitude , " analyzes Laurent Huger, first deputy mayor. But three rare meteorological conditions were found at the same time: a high tidal coefficient, a depression "so great that the ocean swelled by 1.5 meters" and winds at "140 km, 160 km per hour" which pushed the water, he says. The inhabitants were therefore taken by surprise, in their sleep, and the passage of Xynthia - which left 47 dead throughout France - transformed the village forever.
After the storm came the time of the expropriations and deconstructions of houses and that of the trials, which led to the compensation of victims and the conditional sentence of two years in prison by the former mayor, René Marratier. The latter intends to run again at the municipal elections in March. "During the trials, when people were unpacking their story, with 200, 300 people behind in a large room who listened to all of this, (...) and modesty, you have to have more and that is complicated to manage" , underlines Renaud Pinoit, the president of the association of the victims of the floods of La Faute-sur-Mer (Avif).
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To pay tribute to the victims, Renaud Pinoit worked on the construction of a stele on which is engraved the name of each deceased and his age, facing the "golf of the peninsula" .
A nine-hole course now replaces the old housing estates bereaved by Xynthia, on land that has become unbuildable. The project inaugurated in 2017 was not immediately unanimous, but "to revive this place, this is only positive for me" , explains Laurent Roblet, whose family survived the flood in taking refuge on the first floor of the house.
Gain altitude to turn your back on the floods
For the expropriated people, there were "two cases" , explains the president of Avif. First, the active, like Laurent Roblet, who have found accommodation near la Faute-sur-Mer. On the other hand, "the vast majority of retirees have gone further (...) so as to take shelter," further explains Mr. Pinoit. "There are even some who went to the mountains because like that, they were sure not to find the flooding of the sea."
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New residents have arrived and the real estate market is going well, according to the deputy mayor. The team elected in 2014 did everything, explains the first deputy mayor, so that the dykes now perfectly protect La Faute-sur-Mer and so that the station regains its attractiveness. In a few weeks, tourists, who can be up to 10,000 in the summer according to Laurent Huger, will be able to enjoy something new: a skate-park installed on the old municipal campsite, devastated in 2010.
Elsewhere too, the scars of Xynthia remain clearly visible
A few kilometers from the peninsula of Faute-sur-Mer, the small village of Charron and its approximately 2000 inhabitants. There either, we haven't forgotten Xynthia. During the night of February 27 to 28, 2010, a grandmother and her two grandchildren perished drowned. Protecting Charron from the ocean had therefore become a building site, if not the building site, a priority for the municipality. However, ten years later, barely half of the project was carried out to keep this village of Charente-Maritime dry.
Since the storm, 180 houses have been razed to the ground, nearly 500 inhabitants have left and this village near Vendée is trying to recover: three new subdivisions appear on the upper part of the land, i.e. 160 houses sheltering around 400 people, former Charronais, new ones. But the mayor Jérémie Boisseau is getting impatient. He's been struggling for ten years for the Flood Prevention and Action Plan (PAPI) to be implemented.
The project was however simple: two rows of compacted earth dikes, several kilometers long and 1.5 to 2.5 meters high, were to prevent water from reaching the village by blocking it on three sides in an area of wet marsh which would serve as an expansion field. Today, only half is done. To the west and south of the village, the defensive system will soon be completed but in the north, along the Sèvre niortaise, everything is at a standstill.