At the entrance to the Pont de Vivaux gymnasium, residents evacuated from La Gardanne, a district of Marseille bordered by the Huveaune, face bad weather, against bad luck. “I’m going to sleep on a camp bed, it will remind me of the army,” smiles a castaway old enough to move with a cane and to have fought in Algeria. Cigarillo with his lips, sheltered by the thin edge of the roof, he observes the rain which then falls in small drops. “Vé, it hardly rains. Tonight I sleep in my bed! », Launches a neighbor. “Stop, they won’t let you go,” replied the man with the cane with a smile.
“The police came to get us”
The thirty people welcomed by the town hall in this gymnasium all know each other, or almost. They have shared the same neighborhood for several years. By early afternoon, 123 people had been taken to shelter, the town hall announced. Forced evacuations that do not satisfy the inhabitants. “We were forced to leave, the police came to pick us up at the end of the morning”, plague Ginette *, a young lady of around 70, who left with her “cat”. “We were told, we are protecting you, we are not evacuating you,” she laughs with her friends. A preventive measure dictated by the violent meteorological phenomena in progress, while the city of Marseille experienced its first red storm-flood alert.
Shortly after this conversation, around 4:30 p.m. a new curtain of rain, brief but intense, descended on the city. Most of the evacuations directed at this gymnasium were carried out around noon, but some continued into the afternoon. Like Fabrice and Hugo, two brothers, around 20 and 30 years old. “It’s a movie today, I can’t take it anymore,” exclaims Fabrice arriving with his dog.
“Nothing to do with the floods of 1978”
At the end of the afternoon, the castaways awaited instructions and all hoped to be authorized to return to their homes before dark. For the older ones, the episode has nothing to do with the 1978 floods, and development work has been carried out since. “We moved around the city by boat,” recalls Elie, 85 years old. Richard, his son-in-law, was all the same prepared: “We put the chairs on the tables, we took our dog and our three cats, and we left,” he says, simply.
At the end of the afternoon, Marseille seemed to have passed between the drops of a second stormy episode and Météo France, planned to gradually lower its alert levels during the night while the concern was on the Var. At 6 p.m., the evacuees were preparing to spend the night in the gymnasium, unless by night the town hall allowed them to return home. In which case, our soldier will not have to sleep on his cot.
* Loan first name