Impressive images. Intense rain continues to fall this Thursday, October 17, 2024 in the departments around the Mediterranean. Six of them were placed on red alert for floods and rain-flooding according to the map issued at 2 p.m. by Météo France: Loire, Haute-Loire, Rhône, Ardèche, Alpes-Maritimes and Lozère . Nineteen departments are also on orange alert.
Follow our live stream on floods and flooding in the south of France this Thursday, October 17, 2024
In Annonay, the largest town in Ardèche, the town center has been underwater since this morning. The city has evacuated its schools and nurseries while public transport is interrupted. In the Rhône, it is the river Games which is in flood, causing the flooding of the A47 motorway near Givors.
“At 12:30 p.m., the Sdis de l’Ardèche teams carried out more than 230 interventions, particularly for flooding of premises, exhaustion and rescues”indicated the Ardèche prefecture in a press release.
“Rescue and shelter operations involved more than 110 people”she explains, specifying that“they were carried out using land and helicopter means”. No injuries have been reported at this stage.
“We will certainly break records”
These images demonstrate the heavy rainfall recorded in recent hours in the region. “We should reach 200 to 300 mm, perhaps more than 400 locally” in 48 hours, estimated Wednesday Stéven Tual, meteorologist for Breton time . However, these forecasts are already largely exceeded in certain places.
Over 48 rolling hours, from Tuesday to Thursday, at 3 p.m., there was 641.9 mm of precipitation in Mayres (Ardèche) and 526.3 mm in Villefort (Lozère). Several municipalities in Ardèche already exceed 400 mm of accumulations, over the same period: Barnas (507.9), Mazan-l’Abbaye (427.2), Sablières (420.1)… For comparison, the average cumulative rainfall recorded over the entire month of October in Villefort is… 283.2 mm.
“We will certainly break records” observes Yann Amice, who does not exclude further accumulations of more than 600 mm by the end of the day. Records that weather models have “a little underestimated” according to the meteorologist for Weather’n’Co. “Certainly because they are not used to making forecasts based on a fairly explosive combination, with the dynamism of the Cévennes and a warm and humid tropical air mass. »
A phenomenon “supercharged” by ex-Hurricane Leslie
This Cévennes episode is nothing unusual for the season. Concretely, the still high temperatures of the Mediterranean generate a mass of hot air loaded with humidity which, under the effect of a depression for example, is propelled onto the Cévennes massifs (hence its name). As it gains altitude, it encounters colder air masses, which leads to thunderstorms and intense precipitation.
But the intensity of the phenomenon is found “supercharged” by ex-hurricane Leslie, which returned to the Iberian Peninsula at the start of the week. A “vector very loaded with water” which joins the mass of air propelled over the Cévennes, according to Yann Amice.
