Anniversary of the 1999 floods/The submerged plain between Narbonne and Cuxac

“The water rose very quickly, explains Régis Hérail of the Raonel estate in Cuxac d'Aude and Narbonne. When we got up in the morning, the house was full of water. Outside, it was just a huge expanse of water. It had filled the entire plain. We were stuck for a week, cut off from the world. We didn't know that just a few kilometers away, people were dead.”

Dramas that have affected the area: “One of my employees, who lived in Les Garrigots, aged around thirty, while trying to catch up with his dog, was swept away by the current and drowned…”

The stumps lying on the ground

“On the 80 hectares of the estate, we did not have any loss of harvest since it had come in. We deplored significant masses of earth displaced, in the passage of this strong current. Everything was gullyed. We saw the violence of this raging water. The espaliers were twisted, lying on the ground. All our wheat seeds were lost in this furious water. There were ice jams everywhere, grass, branches, rubble, everything on the ground. passage of this current was very marked There was a lot of work, we were offered to get help from the army but we refused, we had not lost any vines, there was worse elsewhere…”