Chapter One

Battle to Save Lake Annecy

Alan McGregor, Geneva Correspondent,

The Times of London, The BBC and CBS,

published in 1977.

1.8 "The Public Health Bureau, responsible for monitoring the drinking water supply drawn from the Lake, was more specifically worried by the laboratory reports of rising bacteria counts especially in summer.

1.9  With the advent of aqualung diving as a popular sport,  stories about the piles of rubbish dumped into the Lake from boats became rife, and the increasing murkiness of the depths was obvious.

1.10  The people really concerned at this deterioration were, of course, only a handful of the town and lakeside communities' population of 75,000. But they included the Mayor, Charles Bosson, and the Assistant Mayor, Dr. P.L. Servettaz who also happened to be Vice-president of the French Federation for Underwater Studies and Sports.

Mirror of the Mountains

1.11  These concerned citizens had to overcome general indifference. The blue Lake in summer, a mirror of the mountains around, was in the growing prosperity of the first post-war decade, more popular than ever with tourists. Less evident was the fact that an increasing proportion of these visitors were from nearby towns also set on lakes, agreeable to look at but much less pleasant, even revolting in closer proximity. Sightseers regularly came from such places as the Lake of Bourget at Aix-les-Bains, 30 kilometres west of Annecy, polluted by industrial and domestic effluent from Chambery: the Lake of Nantua in the nearby Jura: and, of course, Lake Geneva itself, where cries of dismay were reaching a crescendo.

Sounding the alarm

1.12  In defiance of public complacency, Mayor Bosson and his friends sounded the alarm. They called in the Department of Roads and Bridges, guardian of the country's rivers and lakes, to assess, with the full weight of its authority, the state of the lake.

1.13  Simultaneously, the group embarked on a public education campaign aimed, first, at leaders in the lakeside communes. It was based on simple fundamentals, such as the reminder in Dr. Servettaz's excellent book, "Life of an Alpine Lake", that life in any form cannot exist without water, which comprises 60 per cent of man's weight, including 81 per cent of his brain matter."

1.14  "Water," he adds, "tends to incorporate a part of everything it touches, thus preserving the souvenir, in varying degrees, of all its contacts, both enriching and degrading...". He points also to the risks to which whole populations are exposed by toxic effluents, "not forgetting the virulent bacteria from hospitals, few of which possess a tank for efficacious primary purification before discharge into the common drainage system".

1.15  A telling point in the environmentalists' arguments until then not generally appreciated, was the relatively modest capacity of the lake - some 1,124,500,000 cubic metres.  This small capacity makes Lake Annecy's life-cycle significantly more vulnerable to modern pollution than is the case with much deeper Alpine lakes which may have the same surface area, but contain larger reserves of oxygen.

Waging the battle

1.16  The battle, if not the war, was won with the appearance of the Roads and Bridges' official report. "The Lake of Annecy is in decline," it said," and heading towards eventual demise some 15 to 20 years from now." Annecy suddenly visualized with horror its Lake in the same stage of degeneration as Bourget or Nantua.

1.17  In 1955, two schemes were considered. One was a chain of purification plants for all used water then being discharged into the Lake. The other involved the collection of this water in main collector pipes running all around the Lake and leading to a single large treatment plant. This plant, in turn would discharge into the River Fier - a tributary of the Rhone - at Cran-Gevrier, below Annecy. A necessary complement of either scheme would be a further installation for dealing with domestic and industrial waste. The second alternative was chosen. A syndicate for the cleansing of the Lake came into being in July 1957. It initially comprised eight communes. Today, it includes 17 with more to come. The President of the Syndicate, Albert Janin, had the immensely difficult task of persuading these communes, who were set in their traditional ways of life, to commit themselves to expenditures likely to burden taxpayers for the foreseeable future..

1.18  After Janin's death in 1964, Louis Lagrange took over the post, operating from an administrative office at the Cran-Gevrier plant. "If pollution appears in the Lake, we can answer an emergency call round the clock", he says. "The persons responsible are taken to court at once."

1.19  "The initial scheme has been enlarged to cope with an estimated 157,000 inhabitants in Annecy and the neighbouring lakeside area in 1990. A total investment of F fr 110 million is now projected, the state providing a 30 year low-interest rate loan plus 50 per cent subsidy. Per capita direct cost to the population concerned is F fr 15 annually.

1.20  Some 160 kilometres of collector pipes, out of a planned total of 260 are now in place. Every new house has its drainage linked directly to the main system. Where appealing to common sense has failed, new by-laws have provided a strong arm.

Save-the-Lake

1.21  A milestone in this clean-up campaign was reached on 5 October 1972. As the Council of Europe's star-studded blue flag fluttered alongside the colours of France and Savoy in front of the Annecy Town Hall, a delegation from Strasbourg presented Mayor Bosson with the Goethe Foundation Award for nature conservation. The delegation was headed by Count Lennart Bernadotte, who, from his home of the Isle of Mainau in the middle of Lake Constance, is one of the most vigorous advocates of measures for restoring to health that particular expanse of deteriorated water.

1.22  Today, the Lake of Annecy is fully convalescent. The clarity of its recent past is gradually being restored and there is a sharp reduction in ammoniacal levels. The water has again become virtually drinkable. Pumped from 30 metres down to the town supply plant, it requires little more than filtration.

1.23  There has been no miracle at Annecy. The "Save-the-Lake" movement has had a long and hard struggle to restore the situation to what it is now. But the Lake has always been spared any major industrial pollution. Essentially similar problems exist now, or will exist in the near future, in many developing countries. But the example of Annecy, once again, shows that although the prevention is expensive, it is less costly by far than the cure."

* Abstracted from "Two Tales of Two Lakes - UN Development Forum, Jan -Feb 1976.

Alan McGregor (1977) Battle to Save Lake Annecy, Water International, 2:3, 13-32, DOI 10.1080/02508067708685772

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