the essential
Very violent winds swept across a large northern half of France on Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 December. The damage is significant while nearly 30,000 homes are still without electricity.
Normandy, Brittany and Hauts-de-France were not spared this weekend by storm Darragh, causing significant flooding and damage. More than 30,000 homes still remained without electricity supply in the first two regions cited, said electricity network manager Enedis.
The region on alert for “strong winds”
This new autumn storm was accompanied from Friday evening by gusts of violent winds. On Saturday, Météo France placed the departments of Manche, Calvados and Seine-Maritime on orange alert for “strong winds”, before downgrading them to yellow alert on Sunday, December 8.
In the English Channel, where the winds were the most violent, gusts reached 159 km/h in Carteret. Further south in Granville, the anemometer at the measuring station recorded 137 km/h at the time of the most intense gusts.
But in addition to these gusts of wind there was a lot of precipitation, causing flooding in places.
Numerous damages recorded
The storm, which devastated everything in its path, heavily mobilized the emergency services. According to the Manche Departmental Fire and Rescue Service (Sdis), contacted by Ouest-France, “124 interventions yesterday and around forty since 7 a.m. this morning” took place. “No major facts to report. These are routine interventions linked to the strong gusts of wind still present in the department” they wanted to clarify. The Calvados prefecture, for its part, recommends that residents “limit” travel and take “shelter”.
A 120m long barge runs aground in Seine-Maritime
Despite everything, many incidents have been reported. In Seine-Maritime, a barge ran aground on a beach in Sotteville-sur-Mer, after drifting for several hours, pushed by the violent winds of the storm. There were no casualties and “there is no proven risk of pollution”, a spokesperson for the maritime prefecture told AFP, stressing that the AMT Challenger barge was empty. In a press release, the department's prefecture explained that the barge “detached itself from the tugboat Boka Glacier flying the Maltese flag in the English Channel, in British waters” on Friday.
In Coquelles, in Pas-de-Calais, the roof of an EHPAD flew off, while a man was injured when a tree fell on his vehicle.
u26d4ufe0f AUCUNE CIRCULATION TRAINu26d4ufe0f
ud83duddd3ufe0fFrom Saturday December 7 and Sunday December 8
ud83cudf2cufe0fStorm Darragh is underway with significant gales.
Strong gusts of wind were measured this morning by @meteoFrance in @RegionNormandie with peaks of up to 130km/h on the coasts,… https://t.co/Gn9hjTeiWL— SNCF NOMAD TRAIN (@train_nomad)
Man found drowned
According to Ouest-France, a 66-year-old man, who had been declared missing by his family, was found dead, drowned, early in the afternoon. Emergency services recovered the body of the sixty-year-old in a stream near Mesnil-Mauger, again according to our colleagues. “The accidental track is favored and a judicial investigation will obviously be initiated,” declared Franck Liegard, squadron leader of the Lisieux gendarmerie company, to Ouest-France.
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