Gard and Yonne were in turn placed on orange “flood” alert, Monday April 1 at 10 a.m., as had Côte-d’Or and Saône-et-Loire at 6 a.m., then the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône, Var and Vaucluse at 8 hours. Twelve departments are now in orange, the alert having been maintained in Charente, Charente-Maritime, Dordogne and Gironde, according to the Vigicrues national bulletin.
The level of avalanche risk remains high for the entire day (4 out of 5) on the Mercantour and Haut-Var Haut-Verdon massifs, Météo-France recalls.
Indre-et-Loire remains on red alert on Monday in the face of an “exceptional” flood which affects the Vienne river, in the north of the department. The peak of the flood was reached in the morning in Chinon, a town where the population was called on Sunday evening to evacuate as a precaution.
“Since 3:30 a.m., the situation has been stable”, the course of the Vienne “has not increased, we are around 5.40 meters, below the evacuation threshold”, declared to the Agence France-presse (AFP) the mayor of Chinon, Jean-Luc Dupont.
“We are in the median forecast made by Vigicrues. The decline will begin, we are on a plateau, four hours without movement,” he said.
The Indre-et-Loire prefecture confirmed to AFP that “Vienne [had] reached its peak”. Nevertheless, she continues to “monitor Chinon closely.”
“We launched the [evacuation] system at 6:45 p.m. on Sunday and it was completed around 9 p.m., enough time to see all the residents,” explained Mr. Dupont. “About fifty households wanted to stay on site,” he said. “We welcomed 13 people to the accommodation center,” while several dozen others were able to be relocated by relatives.
In Haute-Vienne, Vienne and Indre-et-Loire, the government launched Sunday evening “the accelerated procedure for recognizing the state of natural disaster”, wrote the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, on X.
