A woman died in Rouen, victim of the violent storms which affected France
Violent thunderstorms crossed France on Saturday, claiming a victim in Rouen and leading to the sheltering of scouts who were camping, while 50 departments are still placed in orange vigilance until Sunday morning.
In Rouen, where some streets were transformed into a torrent by the violence of the storms, a woman in her thirties died trapped under a car after being swept away by the waters, we informed the office of the mayor of the Norman city.
“She was found but she died”, said the same source. A little earlier, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin had reported a “Missing woman in Rouen” on Twitter.
At 10:00 p.m., Météo-France lifted the orange “Storms” vigilance for Seine-Maritime and 14 other departments, but 50 other departments, mainly in the north-eastern quarter of France, remain under monitoring.
In the Landes and Gers, hailstones of several centimeters fell on part of the Armagnac vineyard, local winegrowers and officials told AFP.
“This hail corridor followed the entire Lando-Gers border and it is estimated that between 4 and 5,000 hectares of vines were affected and several tens of thousands of hectares of crops were affected in the Gers”, said the president of the Bernard Malabirade departmental chamber of agriculture.
“In Montreal-du Gers, we had hailstones bigger than a golf ball!”, according to the director of the Armagnac interprofession Olivier Goujon.
In Frêche (Landes), winemaker Nelly Lacave found 8.5 hectares of “chopped” vines. “In the vineyards, there is nothing left, the roof of our agricultural building is a giant Swiss cheese and in the house, windows have broken. My father, who is almost 70 years old, has never seen that”, said she is named to AFP.
Not far from there, in Labastide-d’Armagnac (Landes), Mayor Alain Gaube thinks he has “lost between 70 and 90% of the vines”. “On the ground, there is a large part of the leaves and the grapes. The grapes that remain (on the vine) are already brown, they are dead”, he laments.
If no injuries are to be deplored in the Landes, 4,500 homes have been deprived of electricity. Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne promised in the evening that the government would be “there for the affected territories”, turning to the “victims of the bad weather which hits the whole country and to the rescue teams who carried out hundreds of interventions” .
Météo-France had warned that sometimes violent thunderstorms were going to develop in the South-West and progress towards the north and east of the country, accompanied by intense rains (locally 40 to 60 mm in a short time), gusts of wind and hail, particularly in the South-West and the Massif Central.
Under the tents
In fact, the lightning lit up the sky both in Brittany and in Centre-Val de Loire, Normandy or Ile-de-France. Amateur photographers have posted images of the top of the Eiffel Tower struck by lightning on the networks.
“State services and the means of @SecCivileFrance are mobilized, ready to intervene,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said on Twitter, inviting the population “to follow the advice of the authorities and to remain very vigilante”.
In Vincennes, east of Paris, the We love green music festival had to be interrupted because “the conditions are not pleasant either for the public or for the artists”, announced a speaker on stage, according to a journalist from the AFP.
On the National Estate of Chambord (Loir-et-Cher), 30,000 unit scouts from France gathered for the Pentecost weekend had to be sheltered, including a third inside the castle. -same.
“The storm passed around 4:30 p.m. It lasted a few minutes but it was relatively strong and a gust of wind knocked down the Cubs’ tents”explained to AFP Damien Tardy, in charge of press relations for the movement.
“Ten thousand young people, aged 8 to 12, were sheltered in the castle in cooperation with the prefecture”, the oldest “in a sloping plain”, according to him. “They are in tents under ponchos and were singing when I went to see them.”
Far from this stormy supercell, Corsica has seen the mercury soar: a heat record for the month of June was recorded in Cap Corse, in the north of the island, with 37.4 degrees, according to Météo- France.
At 8 p.m., “about 5,000 homes were without electricity in very localized areas” distributed in all regions affected by storms, according to Enedis