After three exhausting days and as many nights, the residents of the coastal rivers of the Pyrénées-Orientales (Agly, Tech, Têt) and then the Aude (Aude, Réar) were able to breathe again on Thursday evening when the orange alertness was maintained in both departments.
In the upper Aude valley, the sector most affected by the flood (400 mm of rain, not counting the melting of snow), the muddy and icy river invited itself into the Flassain district of Limoux, after having martyred upstream, the municipalities of Axat, Quillan and Couiza. It was Wednesday afternoon, at the height of storm Gloria when the department had just gone into red flood alert.
"I am sixty-three years old and I had never seen that. At 1 p.m., the Aude was in the garden and two hours later in the house, practically a meter! I couldn't do anything except move the car, ”exclaims Martine Gleizes, busy emptying and cleaning with a squad of relatives and friends. A little further, pumping operation at Bruno Cabannes, while the garden is still flooded. And that, in its bed, the Aude continues to roll an impressive flow.
Hundreds of displaced people
Wednesday afternoon, along the furious Agly, we witnessed a massive decline in populations. Nearly 1,500 people were evacuated in the 500-meter strip around the dikes downstream of Rivesaltes, between Claira and Le Barcarès. Gendarmes and municipal police officers crisscross the plots to execute the prefectural decree. In the sky, helicopters fly at low altitude to spot at the end of the day the lit windows, the forgetful and the last recalcitrants, summoned to pack their bags in a stressful atmosphere.
Here we want to reduce human risk to nothing by anticipating, as in the Aude valley. “Between the October 2018 express flood and this episode, it's day and night. In 2018, the phenomenon was sudden and completely unpredictable and we had six deaths. This time, we had time to organize ourselves. Elected officials were even able to go to the Faubourg district on Wednesday evening to reassure residents who were worried, ”says Eric Menassi, the mayor of Trèbes. He welcomes the implementation in his commune of the Barnier plan: forty houses declared uninhabitable after 2018, a school, a swimming pool to be moved.
"My car was parked at the top of the village"
"In 2018? I had lost my car. This time my vehicle is parked at the very top of the village and from 19:50 on Wednesday evening I received many warning messages from the town hall, "confirms Jean-Luc Carrillo, a young retiree from Puichéric, a village practically cut off from the world on Thursday morning, only accessible by a broken road.
On the first floor of a house, a young couple with a five-month-old infant is stranded without water, electricity, and therefore no heat. They will have to wait for a favorable moment, between two peaks of flood to leave the trap of Gloria which, finally, in France will not have made victims. In Spain, the storm left at least seven people dead and four others are missing.
Newsletter - The essentials of the news
Every morning, the news seen by Le ParisienI'm registering
Your email address is collected by Le Parisien to allow you to receive our news and commercial offers. Find out more
"And yet, in the upper Aude valley, the intensity of precipitation was exceptional, the highest recorded since 1891," said Alix Roumagnac of Predict Services. An obvious sign that the management of the terrible Gloria storm was perfectly orchestrated. In Aude and the Pyrénées-Orientales, real life will resume from Saturday, with the return of public transport.