Vigilance is still required on Sunday March 10 due to bad weather associated with storm Monica, with cumulative precipitation of up to 150 millimeters in places. Five new people, including two children, are missing in Gard, swept away by floods while trying to cross bridges by car during the night from Saturday to Sunday, the prefecture announced in the morning.
A father and his two children aged 4 and 13 were taken away in Dions, north of Nîmes, around 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, and two other people in Goudargues, in the north of the department, on Sunday around 5 a.m., said during a press briefing Frédéric Loiseau, secretary general of the prefecture.
A first person had already been missing since Saturday in the department. It concerns a 62-year-old motorist, swept away around 7:45 p.m. on Saturday when the car he was in took a submerged bridge in Gagnières, in the north of Gard, on the edge of the Ardèche department, despite the calls from the authorities not to travel. The other occupant of the car managed to get out of the vehicle and took refuge in a tree, before being taken care of by firefighters.
Authorities were also looking for a man in Saint-Martin-de-Valamas, in Ardèche, the department’s prefecture announced on Sunday, bringing the total number of people missing following the bad weather to seven.
The Minister of the Interior announced on Sunday that only the vehicles of the seven missing people had been spotted, and that “no trace” of them had been found. “Four helicopters, three from civil security and one from the gendarmerie”, as well as “drones”, are participating in the search, added the minister. Around “300 firefighters” are also mobilized. Speaking from the crisis headquarters, Place Beauvau, Gérald Darmanin stressed that the “precipitation had been very significant in Gard and Ardèche”, with “even more intensity last night”. He argued there had been “thirty-five rescues.”
Orange flood alert (third alert level out of four) is still in effect on Sunday in Ardèche, Aveyron, Gard, Lozère and Var, according to Météo-France. The Alpes-Maritimes, for their part, were on orange rain-flood alert until Sunday morning and on avalanche alert until 5 p.m. In the South-West, Charente-Maritime and Gironde are on orange flood alert while the coast of Landes and Pyrénées-Atlantiques was placed on orange wave-submersion alert.
Up to 150 mm of rain in twenty-four hours
The accumulations of rain are very significant locally, underlines Météo-France in its 6 a.m. vigilance bulletin on Sunday. Cumulative precipitation amounts of 302 mm in La Souche and Mayres, 305 mm in Barnas, 263 mm in Loubaresse, and “more generally 120 to 200 mm in the Cévennes” were reached, even if “the bulk of the precipitation in the ‘Cévennes episode is over’.
“In the Var, the accumulations are between 60 and 80 mm, 150 mm are recorded in Méounes-lès-Montrieux”, underlines Météo-France. The firefighters of this department announced on Sunday morning that they had “carried out around forty interventions linked to bad weather, including the safety of seventeen motorists” and interventions on threatened homes with five people having to be rehoused.
Preventive evacuations ordered by the municipalities concerned at least 90 people in the municipalities of Fréjus, Grimaud and Hyères, according to the same source.
The Var prefecture, for its part, announced that “the heavy rains of the night did not lead to widespread overflowing of the department’s watercourses”, but that “points of vigilance [persist] on certain watercourses. water which may further swell during the morning [Sunday].” Nearly half a dozen roads are also closed in the department.