It’s time for reckoning. Sunday, at the end of the day, part of Hauts-de-France was the victim of violent storms, accompanied locally by tornadoes. The village of Bihucourt, in Pas-de-Calais, was particularly impacted by one of these tornadoes, rated at level 3 on a scale of 5 by Kéraunos, the French tornado observatory. The material balance sheet, definitively established on Monday evening, is particularly eloquent.
Monday morning, the day after the passage of the tornado, the expression “scene of war” was for once not exaggerated. The village seemed devastated, especially the center, where there were countless collapsed buildings. The analysis of the damage on the ground by the specialists of Kéraunos sends shivers down the spine. The Bihucourt tornado was rated EF3 on the Fujita scale involving winds between 220 and 270 km/h. A force which makes it the most powerful tornado observed in France since the one which swept the village of Etrochey, in 2013, but a little below that which ravaged Hautmont, in 2008, classified EF4. The trajectory of the tornado was estimated at 20 km, it is also the same one that caused significant damage in the town of Hendecourt-lès-Cagnicourt.
Nearly 50 houses declared uninhabitable
The day after the event, the mayor of Bihucourt, Benoît-Vincent Caille, estimated that 150 of the 370 homes in the village had been impacted. The final report delivered by the authorities on Tuesday is slightly more optimistic with 90 homes affected. On the other hand, more than half, or 48 houses, were declared “unusable” after the diagnosis established by the firefighters of the clearing rescue unit. On its course, the tornado also affected 40 homes in Hendecourt-lès-Cagnicourt, two of which are uninhabitable, and six houses in Mory without however requiring relocation. In addition, according to Enedis, electricity has been restored to all of the impacted areas, “either by the normal distribution network, or using generators”, specifies the prefecture of Pas-de-Calais.
If the mayor of Bihucourt requested, as of Monday, the classification of his municipality in a state of natural disaster, it is not known at this stage whether the procedure has been launched. Just as it is still impossible to precisely quantify the cost of reconstruction, recognizes the prefecture of Pas-de-Calais, contacted by 20 minutes. In the meantime, the victims whose houses are no longer habitable have been taken care of, in the short term, by relatives.