Météo-France has lifted, for Friday February 23, the alerts for violent winds or rain-floods which disrupted the circulation of certain trains on Thursday, but an orange alert for floods remains in Deux-Sèvres, in Vendée, according to the bulletin issued at 6 o’clock.

This orange flood vigilance concerns the rivers of the Sèvre Niortaise, the Sèvre Nantaise and the Lay.

On Friday morning, the weather will be choppy from the English Channel and the Belgian border to Auvergne and the west of the Pyrenees. Under very cloudy skies, rain or showers will be numerous, locally stormy near the coasts, giving snow from 700 to 800 meters above sea level in the Massif-Central and the Pyrenees. The west to southwest wind will gust up to 60 to 70 km/h inland, 80 to 90 km/h locally, 100 km/h near the Channel and Atlantic coasts. On the other hand, from the east of Lorraine and Alsace to the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region and to the east of the Pyrenees, the morning will be calm and sunny, although with a little wind. west up to 60 to 70 km/h near the Mediterranean.

With winds exceeding 100 km/h and torrential rains, Storm Louis swept across France on Thursday, where twenty-seven departments had been placed by Météo-France on orange alert, most of them for violent winds. This is the biggest storm since the start of the year, but it is less intense than Ciaran and Domingos which caused the death of three people and deprived more than a million homes of electricity, especially in Brittany, early November 2023.

During an update on the situation on Thursday evening, the distribution network manager Enedis announced that around 90,000 homes were without electricity, “across a large part of northern France”.

A motorist trapped in his car

In Deux-Sèvres, affected by orange alert for floods, a 52-year-old motorist died, swept away in a river, firefighters announced. The driver found himself trapped in his car after taking a blocked road near Saint-Georges-de-Noisné. “At 1 p.m., the man stepped onto the bridge and the strong current took him into the river. His car was found a hundred meters away stuck in the trees. Trapped inside, the man drowned,” they said.

In Dordogne, a tree fell around 4 p.m. on the car of a couple in their sixties while they were stopped at a red light installed for work, in the town of Buisson-de-Cadouin, said the firefighters. The driver and his wife were unharmed. A logger cut the branches that prevented them from getting out of the vehicle.

As a precaution, the SNCF decided to suspend train traffic in Hauts-de-France, Brittany, Normandy and New Aquitaine on Thursday, to “guarantee the safety of all”. Trees fell on the tracks and overhead lines. “The resumption of traffic on these lines will be effective Friday during the morning,” she said. Traffic was also suspended in Normandy on several lines circulating in the region and to neighboring regions.

In Nantes, a section of the eastern ring road was cut off due to flooding, said Bison Futé.