France: violent bad weather left one dead in Paris

Submerged cars, firefighters in diving suits and 900 displaced people: six departments in France face “exceptional” rain on Thursday of up to 650 millimeters in certain areas. One person was killed and two children injured in Paris following the fall of a tree.

A tree fell in the early evening on the roadway as a man and two children passed by, “in circumstances which will be established and in the context of bad weather”, in the north of Paris (19th arrondissement), affected by heavy rains on Thursday, a source told AFP.

The man was seriously injured before dying. The two children were taken into care in relative urgency, the police source further clarified.

Red alert

Six departments in the center and south-east are placed on red alert for flooding or flooding by Météo-France, the maximum level, and 34 on orange alert.

Two people were rescued in a state of hypothermia but no deaths or serious injuries have yet been reported in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, according to the prefecture, which lists 900 people evacuated, two thirds of which in the department of Ardèche.

“It was just raining, and suddenly I heard screams outside, I went out and saw a torrent coming,” says Philippe Maisonnette, radio presenter in Annonay. In this town of Ardèche, crossed by two rivers, the waters rose suddenly when the Ternay dam, to the north, overflowed.

In Ardèche, where all schools will remain closed until Friday evening, firefighters carried out more than 230 interventions, notably by helicopter to rescue motorists in difficulty.

In Givors, south of Lyon (southeast), the Gier river also overflowed. “The sidewalks are invisible, the water is knee-deep,” describes a 25-year-old resident.

“Never seen before, in living memory”

A “widespread Cévennes episode” gives “exceptional accumulations of rain, mainly on the Ardèche relief”, notes Météo-France. “More generally, a vast disturbance is coming up from the south,” continues the organization.

The Minister of Ecological Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher spoke of a “situation which is unprecedented in its scale. Six hundred millimeters of water on the Ardèche is unheard of in living memory.”

Linking “these episodes to climate change”, she judged that it was necessary to “prepare” for their resurgence, by developing “a culture of risk”.

At the end of the afternoon, around a thousand homes were without electricity in several departments, said the energy supplier Enedis.

Several departmental roads are closed due to flooding or landslides, as is the A47 motorway between Lyon and Saint-Etienne. Rail traffic between the two cities was also suspended, as well as on several lines northeast of Toulouse (southwest). Trains between Les Arcs, Cannes, Nice, Monaco and Ventimiglia in Italy will no longer run from 5:30 p.m., French state rail company SNCF said.

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ATS/Laura Manent

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