Rshovel the mud, pump the water, collect the branches: residents and professionals rolled up their sleeves and noted the extent of the damage on Friday in the center-east of France, the day after torrential rains of “unprecedented” violence.
“The work that needs to be done: it’s a mountain,” noted Friday morning Aurélie Baïba, employee in Annonay, the sub-prefecture of Ardèche, whose center was submerged on Thursday.
Since then, the water has receded and the traders, brooms in hand, tried all day to get rid of the mud and tree branches carried by the water, while a backhoe cleaned the road.
Red alerts lifted
Red vigilance has been lifted in the six affected departments (Rhône, Loire, Haute-Loire, Ardèche, Lozère and Alpes-Maritimes), but three departments — Puy-de-Dôme, Landes and Pyrénées-Atlantiques — remain affected on Saturday by orange vigilance for floods, according to Météo-France. The last two are also for “waves-submersion”.
France had not experienced “an episode of such violence in the Cévennes for 40 years,” noted Prime Minister Michel Barnier. The firefighters carried out a total of more than 2,300 interventions and helped “save lives”, he added.
Three minor injuries were recorded. In Paris, a tree fell on a family, whose father did not survive, without a link with bad weather being formally established.
“In Ardèche, yesterday’s episode was indeed the most intense ever recorded over two days since the beginning of the 20th century,” confirmed Météo-France, which recorded an “unprecedented” level of nearly 700 millimeters in the village. by Meyres.
Numerous evacuations
A thousand people were evacuated and some spent the night in accommodation centers opened by the authorities.
Nearly 3,000 firefighters and law enforcement remained mobilized on Friday. A gendarmerie helicopter made reconnaissance flights over the disaster areas to assess the damage.
In the Loire, in the very affected Gier valley, nearly 80,000 residents are invited to boil their drinking water.
The rest of the country, where the soils are waterlogged after a particularly rainy month of September, has also suffered. In the south of Yvelines, around fifty people had to be evacuated in the middle of the night.
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