the inhabitants of Conty are in shock after the passage of the tornado

The ballet of dump trucks began Monday, October 24 in the morning to clear the rubble in the streets of Conty while crane trucks are trying to stretch plastic sheeting to put dozens of gutted roofs out of water. An unprecedented tornado hit the evening of Sunday, October 23 in the village of Conty, 1,800 inhabitants in the Somme. Eighty houses were damaged, some gutted lost their roofs and dozens of cars were destroyed.

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An episode that the inhabitants of Conty will not forget. Hail, lightning and above all an incredibly violent wind that swept everything away, but fortunately did not cause any victims. Nathalie had to leave her house in the center of the village in a hurry on Sunday evening at 6 p.m. She can’t go back there, the roof of the adjoining La Poste, a century-old building, is on the verge of collapsing on her kitchen. She is still reeling from the dread she felt late Sunday afternoon while watching TV. “Like a bomb, the feeling of hearing a bombsays Natalie. All of a sudden, there were things falling on my head.”

“I took my dog. I crouched down. I was scared and I howled. Then I opened the door to be able to go out because I couldn’t stay in my house anymore. I didn’t I didn’t understand. I was barefoot, I went like that to my daughter’s.”

Nathalie, resident of Conty

at franceinfo

A few dozen meters away, Christopher’s house no longer has a roof. He flew off to land in his yard on top of his cars. He just had time to get his family to safety. “All the windows have started to explode and the roof there is nothing leftexplains Christopher. I have my cars that are dead. Frankly I did not have time to realize, it passes too quickly. The time we hit, to pick up the children, we don’t have time to realize it.”

Same show at the primary school in the village, the roof completely blew away, which made Deputy Mayor José Fail say that in his misfortune Conty was very lucky. “There are hardly any victims. At school, fortunately, there was no class, it was a Sunday afternoon. There were no workers at the Conty sawmill either. which has 25 workers, the roofs could have collapsed on them. But it was Sunday, we had this chance.” For the time being, around thirty dwellings are still uninhabitable, but almost all the families have already been rehoused with neighbors or family. At the start of the afternoon, only one mother and her four children remained to be relocated.