Flooded rivers, flooded streets, dilapidated houses: Pas-de-Calais has been tossed since Tuesday between torrential rains and the comings and goings of floods. The department should finally experience, on the evening of Friday, November 10, the beginning of a lull, offering a little respite to exhausted residents.
Pas-de-Calais is placed on red alert for both floods and rain and floods until at least 4 p.m. The North, Seine-Maritime and Somme are placed on orange vigilance. “Over the last twenty-four hours, we have often recorded between 40 and 60 mm in the west of Pas-de-Calais,” underlines in its latest Météo-France bulletin. Precipitation levels during the duration of the episode are close to the usual amount over a month, underlines the meteorological institute, which anticipates “a clear calm” after 4 p.m. This parenthesis “should last all weekend”, noted the Minister of Ecological Transition, Christophe Béchu, on FranceInfo, while expressing his “concerns” about a new rainy episode at the start of next week.
Precipitation continues to swell the Aa, the Liane and the Canche. The toll remains at three minor injuries since Monday in the area concerned, where nearly 350 firefighters take turns to ensure duty.
Nineteen residents of a small retirement home in Nielles-lès-Bléquin had to be evacuated as a precaution, said the prefecture of the Northern defense and security zone. An operation is also underway on Friday morning on a farm in Montreuillois where around a hundred cattle were saved. The Red Cross has opened twelve accommodation centers, the largest of which is based in Saint-Étienne-au-Mont, where 300 houses were damaged.
In the sectors of Montreuil-sur-Mer, Boulogne-sur-Mer and Saint-Omer, the population once again received the alert message advising to postpone travel, take refuge at height and cut off water, gas and electricity in case of flooding. In Blendecques, on the Aa, where residents tried on Thursday to protect their homes with sandbags, in the hope of limiting the damage, the main streets flooded on Tuesday were no longer flooded on Friday morning, noted a journalist from Agence France-Presse.
Schools in 200 municipalities remain closed on Friday, as the day before, and train traffic remains interrupted on two sections (Boulogne-Etaples and Saint-Pol-Etaples) at least until Saturday, indicated the SNCF.
The insurer Axa has recorded “several hundred claims” in Nord-Pas-de-Calais and we are “getting closer” to a thousand, its regional director, Thibaut Denys de Bonnaventure, announced on Thursday. The state of natural disaster must be recognized on November 14 for the affected towns in Pas-de-Calais and the Nord. More than 50 municipalities have submitted a file, according to the prefecture.
The civil protection of Pas-de-Calais has launched a call for donations and set up a number (03 74 20 03 07) “to connect” disaster victims needing help clearing their homes with those ready to help them.
Although they constitute natural phenomena, floods, cyclones and droughts can be amplified by global warming generated by human activities. Floods are particularly costly disasters: between 1970 and 2019, they accounted for 44% of all disasters and 31% of economic losses.
