Another owner, who bought her property last February, is for her part seeking reimbursement for the land, estimated at 190,000 euros. The legal proceedings in these cases are dragging on.
After discovering a landfill while carrying out work, one of the residents contacted Hugo Meslard-Hayot. This whistleblower provided her with archives which prove, according to these documents, that the site had been identified for a long time.
The phenomenon concerns filled-in ground, often dating from the 1960s, whose nature was not disclosed at the time of transfer or sale, according to the people concerned. Construction work then reveals pollution and instability that the gardens had not shown.
One of them is now suing the town hall that transferred the land to her in 2006. According to her, the municipality never specified that the plot lay on a former quarry filled with waste.
This land was her family's garden for fifteen years. In 2020, after a divorce, she decides to have a second house built there, at the back of the property, in order to stay close to her children.
She then discovers that her plot lies on one of the village's former landfills, used in the 1960s. Waste is found as deep as nine meters.
Continuing the construction work is impossible on this unstable and polluted land. She is claiming 250,000 euros, the estimated cost of decontaminating her garden.
Since 2018, Hugo Meslard-Hayot has been cataloguing the forgotten landfills of Indre-et-Loire. On the map he keeps up to date, each red dot represents a former landfill.
For the owners, the stakes are immediate: polluted soil, halted work and a legal battle to have a buried liability recognized that the deeds had not, according to them, disclosed.