In Corsica, after the deadly storm of August 18, Girolata wonders about its future

Tourists who immortalize its skinny cows on the beach could almost give Girolata its postcard look on Friday, September 2. Fifteen days later the storm that devastated the western Corsican coast on August 18, causing five deaths and twenty injuries throughout the island, the small port is licking its wounds while tourist activity has started up again since August 29. Its coves, still strewn with a dozen sailboats, are a vast cemetery of boats.

Thirty-three inhabitants in winter, seven times more in summer, this hamlet of the commune of Osani (Corse-du-Sud), gateway to the Scandola reserve, listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, is not connected to the road network, which adds to its charm as a destination at the end of the world.

On the morning of the storm, out of the hundred or so ships moored at anchor or on moorings in the gulf, thirty-four were beached or quite simply sunk. The inhabitants still describe with terror this black mass filling the sky which fell at more than 200 km / h around 8:15 a.m. for about twenty minutes.

“I checked that my wife and my children were safe and I jumped with my brother-in-law in a Zodiac to evacuate everyone, it was a stampede, people were jumping in the water, women with children… There was panic,” remembers Benjamin Perrin, a carpenter who runs one of the lodges with his partner. “I thought we were going to find corpses everywhere, given the violence of the wind. » At his side, the ten agents of the harbor master’s office, but also “all who were able-bodied”, hastily jumped into the stormy seas to pick up the castaways, trapped in the hulls that were crashing on the shore.

Read the report: Article reserved for our subscribers In Corsica, after violent and sudden storms: “People were screaming in all directions, the trees were falling like matches”

“On the verge of breaking”

In this hustle and bustle, 320 boaters and summer visitors were brought to safety and then welcomed into establishments or homes. “We dispatched them among the establishments. We treated the wounded. There were two doctors among the tourists, nurses. Then another doctor was airlifted”, continues Benjamin Perrin. During the day, 250 people were evacuated. The others were accommodated in lodges or houses. “There was a huge movement of solidarity from the villagers”says Jean-François Luciani, 70, second deputy mayor and port manager.

The village still mourns its fisherman, Jean-Paul Diddens, 62, one of the five dead in the storm, who disappeared at sea and whose black and white portrait hangs on the harbor master’s office next to a small bouquet of dried immortals.

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