Isère: a speleologist dies during a school outing in a cave – archyde

The school trip turned tragic. A speleologist who supervised an outing of college students died Thursday, in a cave in Isère, near Grenoble. This professional was found dead by the emergency services, after an impressive rise in water. We take stock. What happened? A school outing was on the program for Thursday. Fifth-grade students from a college in Saint-Ismier, in Isère, took the underground network of the Cuves de Sassenage, at the foot of the Vercors massif. A classic route, frequented before them “by thousands of supervised schoolchildren”, according to the Dauphiné Libéré. ​​The class was made up for the occasion of four groups, each supervised by a professional. The excursion begins in the morning. A few hours later, the group is surprised by a sudden rise in water. “The groups were scheduled to come out at around 12:15 p.m., but as they moved towards the exit, the water began to rise in the galleries, the flow accelerating exponentially,” said a rescuer at the local newspaper. Very quickly, the children are then evacuated out of the cave. As the waters rose more and more, a schoolgirl was swept away, immediately caught by a guide and one of her colleagues. The two professionals manage to rescue the teenager, but the rescue guide was finally carried away in turn under the eyes of her colleague, describes the daily. Once the children were placed in safety, two speleologists outside the cave gave the alert to save the two other guides and the teacher who were still stranded inside the cave. What next? An evacuation operation was launched “as soon as a favorable weather window presented itself”, i.e. after 7:30 p.m., said the Isère prefecture in a press release. The water thus began to withdraw from the galleries at the start of the evening. A team of rescuers – gendarmes, intervention group in perilous environment (GRIMP) members of the French Speleo relief and Sdis 38 (Departmental Fire and Rescue Service) – was dispatched to the scene. About thirty cavers were also mobilized to extract the two survivors still alive and the body of the guide, reports France Bleu Isère. The operation ended shortly after 11 p.m., according to the prefecture. During their inspection of the site, the emergency services discovered “a body identified as one of the two guides”, she said. The teacher and the second guide, refugees in an underground cavity, were brought back, healthy and safe, on the surface. According to the local press, the deceased guide was a very experienced Isère professional, also a member of the French Caving Rescue. A judicial inquiry was opened by the prosecution, entrusted to the High Mountain Gendarmerie Platoon (PGHM), to find out the circumstances of the tragedy. unexpected, unpredictable phenomenon, analogous to a real wave ”, indicated to the Dauphiné, a specialist, very good connoisseur of this network of Vercors.