The Valley of Death

Five miles above the quiet Riviera town of Frejus (see map), French engineers five years ago built Malpasset Dam. A graceful, sweeping arc of concrete 738 ft. long and 197 ft. high, it backed the Reyran River into a lake six miles long and two miles wide. Only 22 1/2 ft. thick at its base and 5 ft. at the top, the Malpasset was, French technicians boasted on its completion, the world's thinnest major dam. It was to prove an unhappy boast.

Frejus (pop. 14,000), which likes to call itself "the Pompeii of Provence," is rich in Roman ruins and history. Founded by Julius Caesar in 49 B.C., Frejus helped build the fleet Roman galleys that defeated Antony and Cleopatra in the battle of Actium in 31 B.C. It was at Frejus that Napoleon made his triumphant return from Egypt in 1799, and it was a key beachhead when the Allies landed on France's southern shore in 1944. The golden COte d'Azur begins at Frejus' beach, and this year the dry summer had brought a record in tourists and a good wine crop. But for five days torrential rains had lashed the Riviera, and the lake behind the Malpasset Dam was ominously rising.

"Terrible Cracking." At 6 one evening last week, Andre Ferraud, the dam watchman, decided to open the safety sluices a little, although shortly before, a group of engineers had vetoed such a precaution for fear the overflow might damage the foundations of a new superhighway under construction from Frejus to Cannes.

At 9:05 p.m., Ferraud "felt a terrible cracking" under him. Hastily grabbing his child from bed, he sprinted with his wife for high ground. Moments later, Malpasset Dam burst in shards like a flower pot, and a wall of water 25 ft. high swept down the valley at 50 miles an hour, washing trees, houses, vehicles and people towards the sea. When the flood smashed down on Frejus, the old Roman part of the city was largely spared, but the thickly populated western sector went under.

It was daylight before any organized rescue work could get under way, as helicopter crews from the French carrier La Fayette (once the U.S. carrier Langley) joined gendarmes, soldiers and dazed survivors in searching for the dead and missing. It was not easy work: from the broken stump of the dam to the sea, a great syrupy sludge of mud coated the valley. National Route 7, the main highway from Paris to Nice and Cannes, ended in a mangle of smashed houses and trees and trucks. A mile of the main railroad tracks linking Paris with the Riviera was uprooted. Most appalling of all was the human toll: at week's end, 323 dead, another 200 still missing.

Mass Burials. Bent and sobbing, the survivors filed into the temporary morgues --a boys' school and a church--to identify their dead. In the school the bodies were laid out in burlap in classrooms where the homework was still chalked on the blackboard, and as soon as a body was identified, it was nailed into a coffin and the name marked on top. Many of the victims were children: one coffin bore the chalked names of four from one family. In the church scores of children lay side by side in the prismed light filtering through the stained-glass windows. An attendant washed their faces to help the weeping mothers identify them. As the church began to overflow, a French navy padre, a cigarette grimly clamped in the corner of his mouth, directed volunteers to carry the coffins outside and line them up in three parallel rows at the foot of the steps. Later that day, the first 117 of the victims were given mass burials in deep, fresh trenches dug by the French army.

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