Flooded tracks, debris on the roads, electrical incidents in cascades and slowed down traffic on various train lines… The very violent thunderstorms that hit the Paris region, from the middle of the night until the beginning of the rush hour of morning, complicated the movements of thousands of Ile-de-France residents on Friday.
Numerous incidents - most of them not serious - were recorded on the rail networks between 7 and 8 am.
But it is especially on the road networks that the weather has turned morning trips into hell.
The pavement flooding necessitated the closure of tracks on several major axes: the N7 near the Orly tunnels, the interior A86 in Nanterre, the exterior A86 in Bobigny, the A1 in Saint-Denis private 'one of its 4 lanes just before entering the capital ...
Syntadin, the traffic indicator site for the Ile-de-France roads department, recorded an absolute record of traffic jams around 9 a.m.
Benoit Hasse
These lane reductions added to a high number of collisions or breakdowns resulted in a virtual paralysis of traffic at the height of rush hour. At 9 am, Sytadin, the site of the Ile-de-France Roads Department, recorded a peak of… 425 km of cumulative traffic jams! This accumulation (equivalent to a journey by motorway, from Paris to Saint-Malo) constitutes the new traffic jam record in Ile-de-France, in the morning. The previous record morning peak (375 km of traffic jams) has been shattered.
As for rail networks, the consequences of bad weather were less massive. However, several lines have suffered heavy disruptions. T1 tram traffic was completely interrupted on the entire line from 8:30 am to 9:30 am, then on the “east” half of the line only, following a break in the catenary at La Courneuve. T8 traffic was also interrupted for an hour between the Saint-Denis terminus and the Rose-Bertin station due to the flooding of the track platform. The replacement buses set up on the two lines found themselves stuck in traffic jams.
The road network completely saturated this morning in IDF because of the big thunderstorms since early this morning.
☔️☔️☔️
For now, we are touching wood, the RER / Transilien Network is not holding up so badly (apart from the #ligneH #ligneN) 💪
Good luck to all
Teleworkers, you are lucky 😉 pic.twitter.com/jH3GqHZIyX
- More Trains (@Plusdetrains) June 4, 2021
On the metro side, the flooded Porte de Versailles station (line 12) had to be closed for an hour.
Guy-Moquet station (line 13) was also temporarily closed “for security reasons”.
The operation of lines 6 and 8 was also slowed down in the early morning, following incidents related to bad weather.
The RER C also experienced disruptions in various places on the line, in particular due to flooding in the tunnel at Bibliothèque Mitterrand station or, to the north, in Saint-Ouen station. But RER traffic was not interrupted. Lastly, on the Transilien network, where bad weather did not cause major damage, the circulation of certain trains was however slowed down, in particular on line H. “There were also delays on the first trains of the day on a few lines, because of late returns: that is to say, the dismantling of the sites at night which took longer than expected because of the rain ”, explains one at Transilien.
