International Snow Science Workshop Proceedings - Montana State University Library

Item: Historic snow avalanches in the Pyrenees: the destruction of the small village of Àrreu (Pallars Sobirà)

• • Title: Historic snow avalanches in the Pyrenees: the destruction of the small village of Àrreu (Pallars Sobirà)

    Proceedings: International Snow Science Workshop Proceedings 2018, Innsbruck, Austria

    Authors:

    • Elena Muntán  [ Dendrochronology freelance consultant, Barcelona, Spain ]
    • Pere Oller  [ GeoNeu Risk, Barcelona, Spain ]

    Date: 2018-10-07

    Abstract: Snow-avalanche events which cause destruction and loss of human lives stand out in the memory of people. In the Pyrenees several such avalanches are historically known which correspond to the more than 100-years return period category. In the present work we reconstruct one of these events. Our long-term objective is to reconstruct these historical major avalanches to improve the knowledge on major avalanche cycles, their frequency and intensity in this mountain range. On this occasion we reconstructed the event occurred in 1803 which devastated the small village of Àrreu (ten houses destroyed, and seventeen people killed) and caused its people to move location to a safer place. To the present day, after 215 years, there is no evidence of a similar phenomenon in the proximity of the ruins of the old village. The story of the catastrophe remains like something legendary in the valley’s collective memory, as a circumstance belonging to the past, unlikely to occur nowadays. We combined several methodologies to reconstruct the event and the frequency of avalanches along the avalanche path. Search in historical documents rendered most of the information: when and where it occurred, and how many people were killed. Field inspection and dendrochronology allowed us to reconstruct several events of various sizes, and to obtain an estimate of the frequency at different elevations along the avalanche path, but due to the short age of the trees, we did not detect evidence of the most extreme event. Finally, with all the data we modelized the 1803 event and reproduced the most likely trajectory which destroyed the old village.

    Object ID: ISSW2018_P03.14.pdf

    Language of Article: English

    Presenter(s):

    Keywords: historical snow avalanches, Pyrenees, dendrogeomorphology, snow avalanche modeling.

    Page Number(s): 295-299

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