He discovered the extent of the damage Sunday morning. During the night from Saturday to Sunday, the Truscat saltworks in Sarzeau (Morbihan) was hit hard by storm Céline which shook the West of France. “The dikes held but the water still managed to pass over them and my entire salt harvest was gone,” says Olivier Chenelle, contacted this Monday by 20 minutes. Installed since 2016, the salt worker nevertheless thought he was relatively protected from the risk of marine submersion in this corner of the Gulf of Morbihan. But the situation of heavy rains, strong southerly winds and high tidal coefficients got the better of his working tools.
In a few minutes, its basins were submerged and all the salt that it stored on tremets covered with tarpaulins went back to the sea. “I lost sixty tons in total, a reserve of five to six years,” indicates the salt worker, who estimates the loss “at around 300,000 euros. » “I sold all my production on the markets but I’m going to stop because I have nothing left to sell,” continues this nature lover, who prefers to philosophize rather than lament his fate. “We can’t do anything against nature and fortunately it defends itself given everything we do to it,” he says.
An online prize pool to restore the saltworks
Faced with the urgency of the situation, his wife launched an online prize pool which has so far collected close to 8,000 euros. “We will first have to remove the earth that has spilled into the basins using an excavator and then raise the dikes so that this does not happen again,” explains the salt worker who wants to “continue to believe in it. » “We only live from that so we hope to produce salt again next summer even if it is very uncertain in our profession,” he assures.
Olivier Chenelle, however, has little hope that insurance will cover the damage. “For this, a natural disaster order would have to be issued but I doubt it because the storm did not do that much damage,” underlines the salt worker. In Morbihan, the passage of storm Céline did not cause too much damage. Sunday afternoon, the prefecture reported a report of 800 calls made to the firefighters for interventions, mainly for flooded houses or businesses or for trees fallen on the public highway. Around 800 homes were also without power for a few hours.