The Marseille criminal court declared itself territorially incompetent on Monday to judge EDF, whose massive discharges of fresh water into the Etang de Berre contributed, according to the civil parties, to a serious ecological crisis in the summer of 2018. The court considered that he had “no ordinary territorial jurisdiction” in this case, the prosecution, in Saint-Chamas, where the EDF plant is located, being that of Aix-en-Provence. The Marseille public prosecutor’s office has a specialized center for environmental damage but, recalled the president of the court Céline Ballerini on Monday, “only the public prosecutor” can seize a specialized court, not the civil parties.
In the summer of 2018, thousands of fish perished in what is one of the largest Mediterranean lagoons in Europe and seagrass beds suffered, victims of unprecedented “anoxia”, a fatal lack of oxygen caused in particular by strong heat and no wind. A phenomenon aggravated, according to Gipreb (the union of the pond of Berre), by an intensive turbine, in the previous months, of the hydroelectric power station of Saint-Chamas. In addition to the “sustainable restoration” of the ecosystem, in particular by a new limitation of its freshwater discharges, the Gipreb asked EDF for nearly 14 million euros for economic and ecological damage.
The regional maritime fisheries committee, also a civil party, requested 50,000 euros for its damages resulting from the attack on its mission to protect the environment. At the helm, during the hearing on May 2, an engineer in marine biology, Patrick Astrich, had estimated that the spills of fresh water from EDF were “clearly one of the factors” of this ecological crisis.
A precariously balanced pond
Questioned after the judgment on Monday, Didier Khelfa, mayor of Saint-Chamas, considered that despite the court’s decision “light has been shed on the precarious balance of our pond”. This year, he announced, “for the first time a living organism was observed at the very bottom of the pond, whereas usually at these depths the stratification is such that it is impossible”. Good news which, according to him, can be explained by the fact that EDF “stopped operating in February”.
Since 2020, a consultation bringing together all the players in the territory, and in particular EDF, has been evaluating the benefits of reducing freshwater discharges. At the end of June, due in particular to the invasion of Ukraine and the energy threats to France, EDF announced that it was suspending the quota experiment on Berre “in order to preserve as much as possible the production capacities of the Durance- Verdon to which the Saint-Chamas factory belongs”.
The company supplies a third of the electricity in Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur thanks to its hydroelectric power stations.