Streets and houses flooded. Rivers overflowed on Friday June 21 in the West and Center, as well as in Isère. Floods, which occurred after storms and heavy rains, have caused flooding and significant damage since Wednesday. First in Mayenne and Maine-et-Loire, two departments placed on red alert during the day on Thursday, before being downgraded to orange. Nièvre and Yonne are also affected. While in Isère, the level of the Romanche, in flood, is high. In all, eight departments are affected by at least one orange alert, Friday at midday, either for the risk of flooding or for rain-flooding. Franceinfo takes a look back at these bad weather in images.
In Craon, “exceptional overflows”
“I already saw floods about twenty-five years ago, but we had time to see it coming. There, it happened very suddenly, we had never seen that before.” A resident of Craon, in Mayenne, for more than forty years, Marie-Annick describes an extraordinary situation to France bleu. On Thursday, the Oudon flooded the center of this small town of 4,500 inhabitants. At the start of the afternoon, this river, which crosses Mayenne and Maine-et-Loire, reached a level of 3.25 meters at Craon, well beyond the “historic flood” of 1996 (2.86 meters), according to Vigicrues which reports “exceptional overflows” of the watercourse.
According to Craon town hall, 115 homes, or 350 inhabitants, are located in the area affected by the floods and nearly 300 homes were deprived of electricity during the day on Thursday. A community hall was opened to accommodate people forced to leave their homes during the flood. Eighteen people evacuated due to flooding were accommodated in the municipal campsite, said the city mayor.
“When I left around noon, I had a table floating in the garden and more than 20 cm of water in the house.”
Henri Robert, 78-year-old residentto AFP
Rescue workers, pushing a yellow canoe, went to meet those who did not want to leave their homes.
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The decline began at the beginning of the afternoon and the level of the Oudon had fallen to around three meters by mid-evening, according to the Mayenne prefecture. Friday morning, it reached 2.54 meters, according to France Bleu.
The extent of the flooding in Craon is clear, seen from the sky, photographed Thursday by Vincent Raynal for France 3 Pays de la Loire.
The Minister of Ecological Transition, Christophe Béchu, visited the site on Friday morning, notably to meet the victims and the emergency services and visit the affected areas. It is also expected in Maine-et-Loire. In this department, in Saint-Mathurin-sur-Loire, some 62.6 mm of cumulative precipitation was recorded on Friday at 5 a.m., according to meteorologists. He announced the launch of the procedure for recognizing the state of natural disaster from mid-July for the municipalities affected by the floods in Mayenne.
In the Nièvre, “the water rose suddenly”
The Nièvre department also suffered heavy rain during the night from Wednesday to Thursday, with around forty roads cut in the hours that followed. The village of Narcy, located 30 kilometers from Nevers, was flooded on Thursday. Many residents of the city center had to be evacuated, according to France 3 Bourgogne Franche-Comté. In a bakery, rising water surprised the owners while they were serving customers. “We knew it was coming, but we didn’t think it was going to come this far”testifies the baker, Fabrice Seutin.
“My wife was serving a customer, I heard screaming. There was a manhole that exploded, everything came out and it came all at once.”
Fabrice Seutin, bakerat France 3
With the damage still difficult to fully estimate, the baker is afraid for the future: “We were in recovery. There is a fund in town that started to save us, but it’s complicated.”
A local resident talks about a storm “severe” which required the intervention of the emergency services. “After speaking with neighbors, I understood that from 8:30 a.m., the water suddenly rose, the stream and the river burst their banks”he reports to France 3.
A little further up, in Clamecy, crossed by the Yonne, the decline of the river began on Friday morning, after rising to 1.90 m above normal on Thursday, according to the mayor. “Yesterday at 2 p.m. I was going for a walk when they called me back to tell me that the street was half flooded. (…) In a short time, it rose very, very quickly. My hallway was floodedtestifies Martine, a resident, in front of the BFMTV camera. We’re going to mop it up and then it’s going to be fine.”
In total, around fifty municipalities were affected, according to the Nièvre prefecture. According to France 3, in Pougues-les-Eaux, the casino is flooded: the slot machines were notably affected by the flood. The city swimming pool was not spared either.
In Isère, residents evacuated by helicopter
At the foot of the Alps too, the rivers overflowed. In Isère, residents are being evacuated by helicopter on Friday in the hamlet of La Bérarde, in the town of Saint-Christophe-en-Oisans. They are “transported to the Deux Alpes”, emergency services told France Bleu Isère. The inhabitants have been isolated since the departmental road was cut by “a torrential flood of the Vénéon torrent, linked to heavy rains and melting snow“, specifies the prefecture.
“It’s a small miracle that there are no victims so far, the night was very complicated”tells France Bleu Jean-Louis Arthaud, the mayor of Saint-Christophe-en-Oisans.
In the department, the Romanche also remains on orange alert for the risk of flooding. The level of this river will start to rise again on Friday, under the effect of the precipitation that fell at the end of the night. The peak of the flood is expected during the day, “with a strong risk of exceeding the threshold of damaging overflows”, specifies Vigicrues. Further away, the city of Grenoble is not spared: the road on the bank has been closed since Thursday due to flooded roads.