(Lille) The north of France faced the storm on Sunday evening franklintwo days after the passage ofEunicewhich caused extensive damage and left some 12,000 homes without electricity.
Posted at 4:18 p.m.
Again classified in orange vigilance with strong winds until Monday 1 a.m., the North, Pas-de-Calais, Somme and Seine-Maritime are hit by a “new stormy episode circulating quickly, of less intensity than the recent storm Eunicehowever requiring particular vigilance”, according to Météo-France.
This new storm, called franklin by the Irish Meteorological Service, was to be marked by the movement from west to east of a “narrow but intense band of rain”, accompanied by gusts which could “reach 100 to 120 km/h and locally exceed 130 km/h and strong waves on the Channel coast.
The wind was expected to remain strong in the second part of the night “with coastal gusts of 90 to 110 km / h, very locally more than 120 km / h”.
franklin hits departments where trees and infrastructure are already weakened by the passage Friday afternoon of storm Eunice, accompanied by very violent gusts, even inland.
Despite the efforts of Enedis, which mobilizes “more than 1,000 technicians and partner companies”, around 12,000 customers had still not been able to be supplied with electricity in Hauts-de-France at the end of the day on Sunday, out of the 170,000 customers affected at the height of Storm Eunice.
The technicians work in “difficult conditions”, trees lying on the tracks preventing their good circulation, and the arrival Sunday evening of the new storm was to “slow down the replenishment operations in progress”, while risking causing new damage to the electrical network, underlines the operator.