This Thursday, October 17, at the beginning of the afternoon, Météo-France placed the departments of Lozère on red alert for floods and Alpes-Maritimes for rain-floods, while maintaining the same alert level for the Loire, the Rhône, the Haute-Loire and the Ardèche, making a total of six departments.
“A vast disturbance rises from the south over the country and generates intense stormy precipitation in places”, with a “Cévennes episode” giving “exceptional” accumulations of rain, mainly on the Ardèche relief”, where up to “630 mm in 48 hours” were noted very locally, specifies Météo-France in its 2 p.m. bulletin.
These floods provoke spectacular images, relayed on social networks. Among them, cows carried away by the current in the morning in Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small town of 2,500 inhabitants in Haute-Loire.
In the Loire department, floods destroyed the Chavanay bridge, located in the town of Saint-Alban-du-Rhône and which had been built in 1847.
In the Rhône, among the most spectacular images, are those of a completely flooded supermarket and in Givors, where cars were also swept away by the floods.
In Saint-Marcel-lès-Annonay, in the Ardèche Cévennes, cars were also swept away by the floods.
900 people evacuated in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes
Nearly 900 people were evacuated by emergency services this Thursday in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, where four departments are on red alert. This number, established at 4 p.m., includes in particular 180 residents of a district of Givors, where a dike threatens to give way, specified the prefecture which underlines, on the other hand, the absence of injuries recorded at this stage.
“Never seen before in living memory”, according to Agnès Pannier-Runacher
This Thursday afternoon, the Minister of Ecological Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, described this episode of torrential rains as “absolutely massive” and spoke of an “unprecedented situation”. “We are facing a situation that is unprecedented in its scale. 600 millimeters of water on the Ardèche is unheard of in living memory,” said the minister, adding: “600 millimeters is more than 60 centimeters of water that fell in 48 hours . It’s absolutely massive.”
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