Spider digger saves St Gervais
Digger 'walks' backwards up mountain to release water from the glacier
Is it a bird, is it a plane? No it's a mechanical digger that walks backwards up the mountain to release water from the pocket under the Tête Rousse glacier.
Avid followers of our news page may recall why this mechanised feat is needed - underneath the Tête Rousse glacier is a huge pocket of water, around 65,000m³, that is in danger of bursting and flooding the town of St Gervais below.
The water pocket was discovered in summer 2011 and boreholes were dug to release some of the water, pumping out around 70% of the volume, but the water keeps building up again.
Monitoring systems are in place in case the water breaches as the fear is that a giant wall of water could barrel down the mountain side. In July 2013 St Gervais residents were evacuated at 02:00 after fears that this had happened, but it turned out to be a false alarm.
The digger that TV Mountain filmed has been sent up to create an artificial channel to release more water, and as you can see from the footage it's not easy to get up there..
