“The weather forecasts are reliable now. When we announce a red alert, we have to stop thinking and confine ourselves,” said René Dies, departmental director of firefighters in the Alpes-Maritimes. In the event of the highest level of vigilance being triggered against bad weather, ensuring people’s safety must become a reflex for the authorities and for the population, he argued this Thursday, during a parliamentary hearing, alongside several other relief officials in this department washed out by several floods.
They were invited to discuss the lessons of storm Alex, which caused 18 deaths and considerable damage in 2020, and of depression Aline, three weeks ago, before the National Assembly’s information mission on prevention. risks and the protection of populations.
People sometimes evacuated “against their will”
René Dies spoke of “an extraordinary intervention” due to the breakdown of numerous networks. “For ten hours, nothing. No roads, no telephone, impossible to fly a helicopter…” “If there is one thing to remember, it is anticipation and confinement of the populations,” he noted, adding: Pressing on the toll of Aline depression last month: “Zero deaths, zero injuries and even zero rescue interventions. »
Most places open to the public, from schools to supermarkets, had been closed. And 450 people under threat had been evacuated the day before, sometimes “against their will”, noted Colonel Sébastien Thomas, commander of the departmental gendarmerie group.
The department has been aware since floods caused twenty deaths between Cannes and Antibes in 2015, the majority due to bad behavior: trying to save your car from an underground car park, driving onto a road closed to traffic, etc.
“Too much vigilance kills vigilance”
“We will always have people who will take absolutely crazy risks,” regretted Colonel Sébastien Thomas: “During Aline, we had to deploy, in the middle of a storm, to bring people home. »
But Sébastien Olharan, mayor of Breil-sur-Roya, a town devastated by storm Alex, warned, saying that “too much vigilance kills vigilance”. If Aline was the first red alert in the department since Alex, her town is on yellow alert for violent storms almost every afternoon in the summer.
The mayor therefore pleaded for precise and regular communication from the prefecture to local elected officials, so that he knows when to “make a ton” of their constituents, unimpressed by Météo-France’s maps.