Floods Again!

[Gardian]

Very heavy overnight rain, which seems to have caught the Meteo people out.

Bad floods locally - I had to take a rather circuitous rote to get to the village this morning. Roads impassable all over the place. Sadly, 3 deaths in a car that was swept away.

Just spoke to friends whose house is alongside the Rhone. The river is up to the road outside them, so that'd be 10m up from its usual level. Much more and they'll have to bale out - the worst is yet to come, because the water takes up to 24 hrs to get down to them.

Not good.

[andyh4]

Rivers up very substantially here and that will take some hours to work through to the Rhone.

Admired (again) all of the waterfalls beside the road on our drive down into the valley - normally there are no streams or falls at all.

[idun]

 There were warnings given out last week on french tv. I cannot remember which days, but I certainly saw them.

I do look on this

http://vigilance.meteofrance.com/

and bison futé too for info about the roads, if we are going to be in France.

[NormanH]

I think the major alert was for east of the Rhône; on French T.V. last night the reporter was speaking from Marseille with a view of heavy rain on the Vieux Port behind him.

Very sorry to hear of the floods and the loss of life.

Here by contrast this morning the tramontane has pushed the rain away and I was once again able to eat out on a terrasse in glorious sun

[Gardengirl]

I'd seen orange alerts for the Gard, so knew it might be bad again - so sad to read about deaths due to the floods.

[Pickles]

I saw the forecast that night. There was no advance warning for the very heavy rain or floods to the west of the Rhone. The only warning was to the East. Apparently 8 inches of rain fell in a couple of hours after dark.

Current death toll is 5, three of whom were in the same car washed off a submersible bridge whose deck the next day was about 4 metres above the water level. The only survivor was the father, who managed to get out and raise the alarm. His wife and two very young children drowned: the body of one of the children was found 7 km downstream late the next day.

[Gardengirl]

A truly dreadful night, another of those very localised 'épisodes cévenol' unfortunately. That poor father and husband. There's a call for all submersible bridges to be closed in times of extremely heavy rain.

 

There was an orange warning on http://www.meteogard.fr, by their meteorologist Julien Sugier, which I saw. The main forecasts stayed on yellow alert.

[idun]

I suppose the question is 'would you?'.

We lived next to a ruisseau which would become a raging torrent several times a year, and yet, there was so little water in it sometimes that a friend of ours who was visiting, said that they liked 'the beck' behind the house.

Obviously people who live near these submersible bridges are used to them, but really how fast has that water to be running over it to think........ 'no, I reckon I'll go round'. We have quite a lot of fords not too far from us here in England, and people enter these crossings and there have been cases when they have been swept away too.

I don't mind taking calculated risks, BUT, I know what a force water is and would be very hesitant about using a submersible bridge or ford when the water was raging.

[Pierre ZFP]

Not just in France, I heard on the radio this morning of incredible rains in South of Switzerland and Northern Italy where several people have lost their lives in their own homes due to mud slides.  As much rain in one day as they usually get in a year!

[Frederick]

My Brother in Law is in his 80's . He tells me when he was a child he saw water running over the road through the cast iron walls of a bridge where we now look down a good 20 feet to the river. The powers that be tell us they have "tamed " the river with flood prevention measures ... Oh yea .....They may have permitted houses and businesses to go up that now have river frontage but my brother in laws words would prevent me ever wanting to live there ... I believe whats happened once can happen again.. These weather events we are getting now are going to be causing a lot of people to re plan where they put buildings ,