Dams and barriers between Italy and France: RESBA project promotes resilience and prevention’s culture

In order to prevent the risk connected to dams and barriers, it is necessary for the population and the entire territory to be aware of the risk itself, produced precisely by the presence of this type of infrastructure. RESBA project (RESilience of BArriers) was born with the aim of improving the knowledge of behaviours and strategies to be adopted in the Alpine cross-border areas between Italy and France, where there are several barriers and dams. The project is addressed to all civil society: from freelancers and technicians, to administrators and students. Risk monitoring and risk communication are essential issues for CAE too, which has always believed in spreading the culture of prevention.

The concept on which RESBA project is based is resilience, all with an integrated approach, based on communication strategies focused on the right behaviours to adopt. Particularly, risk management and prevention is a process that goes from monitoring activities, in order to assess the vulnerability of the barriers in the cross-border areas, up to the involvement of stakeholders, through information and communication activities. All without forgetting the training of local administrators, technicians, professionals and schools.

In other words, this initiative, financed by Alcotra, an european regional development fund aims at developing a shared system for assessing vulnerability and barriers’ monitoring, as well as actively involving the local population living in the territories exposed to the risk of infrastructure collapse.

The leading project’s partner is the Aosta Vally Region, together with partners such as the Piedmont Region, the Metropolitan City of Turin, the Prefecture of Savoy, universities and institutes such as the Polytechnic of Turin and IRSTEA, the French national research institute in the fields of science and technology for the environment and agriculture.

All this in a territory straddling the Italian provinces of Cuneo and Turin, the Aosta Valley Region and the French regions of Savoy and Upper Savoy. In these territories, there are barriers with common characteristics: they are located in mountain areas between 1500 and 3000 meters above sea level or in hilly areas at the massif’s feet, between 500 and 1550 meters above sea level. These structures can be classified into three categories: a group with small and medium height and a modest storage capacity; a group at higher altitudes, with a height between 10 and 20 m and an average storage capacity; a series of large barriers at higher altitudes, used for hydroelectric production. The most important infrastructure is the Mont-Cenis dam, which with a flow rate of 300 million cubic meters of water, is the sixth largest barrier in France. Despite being located entirely in French territory, in the case of a collapse of the barrier, water would flow into the territory of the Metropolitan City of Turin. It is no coincidence that one of the steps of this project is precisely a practical exercise of the emergency plan in the area near the Mont-Cenis dam.