The death toll from bad weather in the south-east of France rose to five deaths with the discovery, Monday March 11, of the body of an octogenarian in the Hérault River, near his flooded vehicle, announced the prefecture of Hérault and the Béziers public prosecutor’s office.
The body of this man, aged 87, was found in Hérault, near the town of Pézenas, at the end of the morning, said the public prosecutor of Béziers, Raphaël Balland, to the Agency France-Presse.
A young woman who had been seen with the octogenarian in a business late Sunday afternoon, then in the same vehicle between Pézenas and Agde, was finally found late Monday afternoon in good health, after having been identified and located thanks to the distribution of her photograph by the gendarmerie services, the magistrate then specified in a press release.
She explained that she had been “effectively transported by the victim, who then left alone behind the wheel of her vehicle,” explained Mr. Balland, stressing that investigations are continuing to understand the circumstances of the death.
The body of the children’s father was found
The section of the Hérault river where the victim’s body was found, stuck in branches, about twenty meters from his vehicle, was placed on yellow flood alert this weekend, the Prefecture underlined on X.
With this new victim, five people lost their lives this weekend, swept away with their vehicles by floods, in Gard or Hérault, while three people are still officially missing, two children aged 4 and 13 years in Gard and a man in Ardèche.
The first four victims all died in Gard. A man was found on Sunday morning in Gagnières, a village in the north of the department, after being swept away around 6:45 p.m. on Saturday. Two women, aged 47 and 50, were also caught by water in their car on Sunday morning, around 5 a.m., in Goudargues.
On Monday, the body of the father of the two missing children was found in Gardon, in Dions, a village of 500 inhabitants north of Nîmes. The family car fell into the water from a submersible bridge on Saturday around 11:30 p.m. Only the mother, aged 40, was able to be saved.
All the victims had attempted to cross submersible bridges over swollen rivers, swollen by the downpours that fell Saturday and overnight, sometimes receiving more than a month’s worth of rain in just twenty-five years. four hours. More than 200 firefighters, gendarmes and other rescuers were mobilized in this department to find the missing, with boats, helicopters, drones and dogs.
Six departments are still on orange alert for flooding Tuesday morning: Charente-Maritime, Gironde, Puy-de-Dôme, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Saône-et-Loire and Yonne.