Vigilance is still required on Sunday, March 10, due to bad weather associated with storm Monica, with cumulative precipitation of up to 150 millimeters in places. Sunday afternoon, the Gard prefecture announced that a “lifeless body has[vait] been discovered » in Gagnières, without it having yet been identified. Two more bodies were found “in a vehicle” at the end of the afternoon by the emergency services, who were looking for two missing people in Goudargues (Gard), declared the prefecture onspecifying that research continues.
A 62-year-old motorist has been missing since his vehicle was swept away around 7:45 p.m. Saturday while trying to take a submerged bridge in the town, despite calls from the authorities not to drive. The other occupant of the car managed to get out of the vehicle and took refuge in a tree, before being taken care of by firefighters.
Five other people, including two children, are missing in the department, swept away by floods while trying to cross bridges by car, the prefecture announced. A father and his two children aged 4 and 13 were taken away in Dions, north of Nîmes, around 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, and two other people in Goudargues, in the north of the department, on Sunday around 5 a.m., said during a press briefing Frédéric Loiseau, secretary general of the prefecture.
Authorities were also looking for a man in Saint-Martin-de-Valamas, in Ardèche, the department’s prefecture announced on Sunday, bringing the total number of people missing following the bad weather to seven.
The Minister of the Interior announced on Sunday, at midday, that only the vehicles of missing people had been spotted, and that he had not “no traces have been found” of the latter. “Four helicopters, three from civil security and one from the gendarmerie”, as well as “drones”, are participating in the research, added the minister. Approximately “300 firefighters” are also mobilized. Speaking from the crisis headquarters, Place Beauvau, Gérald Darmanin stressed that the “rainfall was very significant in Gard and Ardèche”with “even more intensity at night” passed. He argued that there had been “thirty-five rescues”.
Orange flood vigilance (third alert level out of four) is still in force on Sunday in Yonne, Saône-et-Loire, Var, Bouches-du-Rhône, Gard, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Gironde and Charente-Maritime, according to the latest Météo-France bulletin. The Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Landes and Gironde were also on orange wave-submersion vigilance.
Up to 150 millimeters of rain in twenty-four hours
The accumulations of rain are very significant locally, underlines Météo-France in its 6 a.m. vigilance bulletin on Sunday. Totals of 302 millimeters of precipitation at La Souche and Mayres, 305 millimeters to Barnas, 263 millimeters in Loubaresse, and “more generally 120 to 200 millimeters in the Cévennes” were achieved, even if “most of the precipitation from the Cévennes episode has passed”.
“In the Var, the accumulations are between 60 and 80 millimeters, 150 millimeters are recorded in Méounes-lès-Montrieux”, underlines Météo-France. The firefighters of this department announced Sunday morning that they had “carried out around forty interventions linked to bad weather, including the safety of seventeen motorists” and interventions on threatened homes with five people having to be rehoused.
Preventive evacuations ordered by the municipalities concerned at least 90 people in the municipalities of Fréjus, Grimaud and Hyères, according to the same source.
The Var prefecture, for its part, announced that “the heavy rains of the night did not lead to widespread overflowing of the department’s watercourses”, but that “points of vigilance [persistent] on certain watercourses which may still swell during the morning [dimanche] “. Nearly half a dozen roads are also closed in the department.