Environment

'The mountain has collapsed,' shouted one witness Thursday night in the Vercors, a plateau in the French departments of Isère and Drôme.

Thursday evening around 7 p.m., part of a slope in the Vercors massif collapsed near the small town of La Rivière. This impressive landslide was filmed by casual passersby.

"At first I wasn't too worried because the landslide was still far from the road," he testified to Le Parisien. "I thought that workers from the local quarry were blowing up a section of the mountain with explosives, as is often done. But when I saw the mass of rock approaching, I saw that this could not have been caused by some dynamite. It was far too big, far too violent. I passed literally three seconds before the rocks hit the road. My children and I were about to be crushed, I am still in shock. When I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw that the rocks wiped out everything in their path."

In the end, miraculously, no one was injured, but those watching the footage here can agree that this really could have ended much worse.

(FVDV for Tagtik/Source: Le Parisien/Illustration picture: Unsplash)