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Scary Night !


Gardian
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As anyone who lives in the Midi or nearby will know, it was pretty hairy last night.

Around here the thunderstorm started mid-evening and the juice went off at around 21.30. It continued all night, raining really hard. We've experienced rain like that on plenty of occasions, but not for 8 hours continuously.

I went to the village for bread this morning (juice still off) and everything was shut down. I had phoned EDF to try to establish the anticipated 'outage' and it appeared from the recorded message that almost the whole of the Gard was off.

Later this morning we went a little further afield to try to get bread and a few other essentials and there was a lot of local flooding. Much worse in Montpellier though, I understand.

Problem is that there's more to come and there's rumbles of thunder as I type this.

p.s. GG - the power stayed on in Uzes apparently. 

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[quote user="idun"]

I hope that you are OK and have suffered no flooding.

[/quote]

Thanks, but we're on pretty high ground so if we get flooded, everybody else has a serious problem.[blink]

All the land around about is completely saturated, so much more of this and there really will be some bad flooding. We've been on and off the pc and unplugging all day because of the thunderstorms - although we have a parafoudre, I just never trust it in case of a direct hit (had one before and it sizzled the pc).

Had to abandon watching HIGNFY tonight (no signal), so grumpy. There's a repeat in the next day or so though - provided the weather holds up. 

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Powerful photo, Norman. Hope things have been calmer overnight for you, Gardian; I can imagine it was like something from a horror film, and in total darkness for you both. I've been following on Midi Libre online - dreadful.

Sounds like plenty more to come,so a lot more will be coming down the rivers from the Cevennes; I heard that the Gardon around Ales is bad, but the Vidourle was OK, so no problems at Sommieres yet. Montpellier sounded very bad. Water has reached the levels of the November 2008 floods at Remoulins, above 3m 20!

We had an email last night asking for help to clean up our AVF building after it flooded, so I guess many of the families in nearby villas will have suffered too.

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Must have been concentrated in the east of the region, as it was bad the week before with 24hrs of continuous rain, but last Thursday I only picked up real rain as I drove to St Chinian for a meeting, (and got drowned getting from the car to the room), and though we had thunder and heavy rain on Thursday night, it was not so prolonged, and apart from snippets of heavy rain since, its been ok in the western parts of the the Herault ..... at least where we are!

Our major problem of flooding the valley NW and W of Narbonne are when it rains on the Pyrenees and the West of the Montagne Noire - otherwise we seem to miss the stuff coming from east of Beziers.

Hope it's settling down a bit now as here we seemed to have moved from summer into winter overnight on Wednesday.

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[quote user="Pickles"][quote user="pachapapa"]Media video clips most everywhere yesterday evening featuring helico winch out.

So stop worrying yourself.[/quote]

Errr ... the one that was missing has been found, dead.

http://www.midilibre.fr/2011/11/05/exclusif-le-corps-du-sdf-disparu-retrouve-a-montagnac,412897.php

Regards
Pickles
[/quote]

True!

But he wasn't the one hanging to a tree referred to by the earlier poster.

But then again the M 25 videos seemed a little more serious, nasty stuff fog with a fireworks display.

Was that at bridgewater or taunton?

Featured on TF1 at lunch time.

Didn't see anything about the hellico rescue on Sky News though.

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[quote user="pachapapa"]     ... But then again the M 25 videos seemed a little more serious, nasty stuff fog with a fireworks display. Was that at bridgewater or taunton? ... [/quote]

M5 Pacha... Taunton just after the entrance of J25 on to North bound M5. I saw the helicopter pictures just before lunch on BBCNews and at least 6 lorries are involved, 3 of these are just a charred pile of tangled steel and several cars still stuck inside that mess.

Dreadful [:(] ...

I remember driving along the M4 to London on Bon-Fire night last year. It was quite a scary drive as every ten miles or so you could see fireworks going up from nearby towns and villages. At times you could well have thought that the fireworks were taking off from the carriage way itself as in the dark you are oblivious to any point of visual direction. Some were quite near indeed and we all know the unpredicting nature of fireworks once lit up ....

 

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Despite the weather forecast saying that the rain would diminish, there's not much sign of that yet. Whilst it has lacked the sheer intensity of Thursday night, it has been steady and quite hard.  As you say GG, the problem is when it gets further downstream towards the Rhone and has been fed by umpteen rivulets. Add to that another cloudburst and you've got a nasty combination.

Quite understandably, they're pretty paranoid about it around here since the serious floods of 2003 (or it might have been 2002 - either way, before our time). The village was flooded to a depth of about 2m and there's been all sorts of plans as to how to mitigate the problem. The boulangere was telling me this morning that the cellar where they keep their flour was flooded out on Thursday night - not happy! She was even less happy when the Maire dropped by and noticed their pump in operation - "Ooh, you've got a pump have you? That might come in handy if we get a problem."

Some 20 kms away, we have friends who live right alongside the Rhone. In 2003, he had to swim to the Pompiers' boat and she had to be rescued out of their 1st floor bedroom window. Somewhat undignified.  They'll be keeping a close eye on the water levels. 

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I watched TV5 Journal de 8h last night and as far as I could tell, they were expecting more heavy rain and localised very heavy storms again, it looked bad to me.

We were fortunate to not see any flooding in France, but I remember seeing all the flooding in many french regions, I can but feel for everyone who gets flooded.

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I was just having a look at the Meteo to see when this rain was going to end.  Sunday lunchtime they reckon.

Anyway, they gave the precipitation levels over the last two days.  At a small town in the Cevennes, roughly 80kms to the west of us, they've had 687mm! That's 27" in real money.  I just can't get my mind around that.

Around here, it's a mere quarter of that.[blink]

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A lot of work has been done since the horrific floods in 1999

http://www.languedoc-roussillon.ecologie.gouv.fr/risques/inond99/hydrogeomorphologie/liens/photos.html

when whole bridges were washed away

People such as Judith will certainly recognise some of the places affected

this shows some of the riskiest areas

http://www.languedoc-roussillon.ecologie.gouv.fr/risques/inond99/hydrogeomorphologie/carto/coursdeau.html

Lots of photos of the present problems (it is still raining here)

http://www.midilibre.fr/2011/11/04/episode-cevenol-les-photos-du-deluge,412465.php

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And the area between the Mendips and the Quantocks is particularly prone to low lying fog. It would seem to me to be verging on the criminal for a local authority not to have taken some positive action to reduce the visual interference and impairment affecting the normal movement of traffic on a busy motorway.

 

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