Up Close and Personal with an Icy Time Bomb

I have just made a successful Mont Blanc with a Mountain Tracks team of 5. On the way up to the Tête Rouse hut we passed all the engineering works for the draining of the subterranean glacial pool. There are thousands of gallons of water trapped in a large pool below the Tête Rouse glacier. If the pool bursts it will send a raging torrent down towards St Gervais. It's not as if it hasn't happened before. Last time this occurred in the 1800’s it killed a few hundred people. Now it's predicted to affect more than 9000 inhabitants should the worst happen.

I took some shots of the instruments used as an early warning. There is radio transmitter station connected to a cable running across the gully below the main glacier bowl. This is supposed to detect increases in water flow rate. I'm no hydrology engineer but it seems to me if you live in St Gervais you have about 10 minutes to start running up hill!

To drain the lake French engineers have been drilling and digging into the glacier and extracting the water using large pumps. This is lengthy process hampered by the recent poor weather in the Alps. I should imagine they are worried winter will come early and make working at 3200m impossible.

We had a snippet of these conditions last week where the temperatures at that altitude fell to -15degrees with strong winds and snow. Working in these conditions is impossible as all metal equipment starts to freeze. I'm pretty sure the engineers aren’t too happy working in these conditions either.

If the subterranean lake isn't drained in the next two months temperatures will hamper further progress leaving the problem unresolved until the spring. It is already having an effect on ascents of Mont Blanc and walking the Tour du Mont Blanc as certain paths are closed and the TMB train stops an hour short of the top. Due to this Mountain Tracks have been running some of our Mont Blanc ascents from the Aiguille du Midi as it’s a shorter return journey. Olly Allen Mountain Tracks Guide