The body of a twelve-year-old child washed away by a river in the Gard on Saturday evening, during depression Monica, was found on Friday March 15, “downstream” of those of his father and his 4-year-old sister, found previously, announced the public prosecutor of Nîmes, Cécile Gensac. “The body of the last missing child, aged 12 and a half, was discovered at the end of the morning by soldiers from the Gard gendarmerie group”, around Dions where the search was concentrated, she said in a statement.
This discovery brings the death toll from last weekend’s bad weather in the south-east of France to eight: six in Gard, one in Hérault and one in Ardèche. No more people are now officially missing.
The two children, as well as their father, were swept away on Saturday evening around 11:30 p.m. by the waters of the Gard after the family attempted to cross a submersible bridge by car in Dions, a village of 500 inhabitants north of Nîmes. Only the mother, aged 40, was able to be airlifted, in weather conditions described as “dangerous” by the firefighters. The father’s body was found on Monday and that of the girl on Tuesday.
The search resumed Friday morning, carried out by some 150 members of the emergency services: around fifteen pedestrian police and divers, around ten foresters from the Gard departmental council and more than 120 firefighters.
In a few hours, three similar accidents occurred in very distinct geographical areas of the Gard department last Saturday (in the Cévennes, in the Rhone Gard and in the Nîmes plain), but with one thing in common: the crossing of submersible bridges , in a meteorological context considered frequent in this department.
On Thursday, the Privas public prosecutor’s office confirmed that the body recovered the day before in Ardèche was indeed that of the man who remained missing in Saint-Martin-de-Valamas, while the department was also strongly affected by the floods.
Storm Monica also left three people dead in Spain, swept away by waves at the seaside.