Scraping the mud, pumping the water, picking up 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 violent torrential rains.unpublished“. “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, have tried all the day of getting rid of the mud and tree branches carried by the water, while a backhoe loader cleaned the road.
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 by a orange vigilance for floods, according to Météo-France. The last two are also for “waves-submersion“.
Bad weather that caused damage everywhere
France had not known “Cévennes episode of such violence for 40 years“, noted Prime Minister Michel Barnier. The firefighters carried out a total of more than 2,300 interventions and made it possible to “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 the most intense ever recorded over two days since the beginning of the 20th century.“, confirmed Météo-France, which raised a level “unpublished” of nearly 700 millimeters on the village of Meyres. A thousand people were evacuated and some spent the night in accommodation centers opened by the authorities. In the Loire, in the Gier valley, very affected, nearly 80,000 residents are asked 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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