"Take a good look, but don't get too close."
Yves-Marie Le Lay, president of the Safeguarding association of Trégor-Goëlo-Penthièvre, boots on and gas mask on his face, shows, using his hydrogen sulphide (H2S) detector, the readings of '' a sample taken a few minutes earlier, on the Grandville beach, in Hillion (Côtes-d'Armor).
A beach closed to the public, in the Breton town most affected by the green tides where almost all the beaches are closed, not far from the Gouessant estuary where a jogger, Jean-René Auffray, was brutally killed in 2016 .
With his small shovel, Yves-Marie Le Lay shows, less than a centimeter under a heap of sun-bleached seaweed, a brown mud with the hints of rotten eggs.
At his side, the former emergency physician Pierre Philippe, who had already expressed his concerns to the authorities about the death of a first jogger in a mudflat in 1989, evokes the health effects linked to this pollution.
“100 ppm here
(Editor's note: part per million, unit of measurement equivalent to a millionth)
, comments the doctor, it is highly toxic.
At 500 ppm, it is uneasy and a high risk of death ”.
Read also Côtes-d'Armor: the fight of a retiree against green algae
Yesterday, Yves-Marie Le Lay filled a transparent jar with a sample of rotting algae.
A “H2S yogurt”, which he hastened to send to the Cooperl, the main cooperative of pig farmers in the Côtes-d'Armor.
"Back to sender!"
": A symbolic gesture that he addresses" to the actors of the agrifood industry that no authority, that no elected representative calls into question, while their responsibility in this pollution has been further underlined by the Court of Auditors and the Senate " .
At the end of this action, Inès Léraud, author of the comic strip “Green algae: the forbidden story” and Pierre Jolivet, director, came to scout for an upcoming shoot on the subject.