The unbearable wait continues.
The search to find four missing people from the Monica Depression had to be interrupted overnight from Sunday to Monday.
“Because, given the situation of the waterways, the intervention is extremely dangerous” at night, the deputy departmental director of the Gard firefighters, Thierry Carret, told AFP in Dions.
The device will be “put back in place (this Monday) morning and recalibrated according to the drop in watercourses,” he explained.
More than 300 firefighters, gendarmes and other rescuers in total were mobilized in this department, with boats, helicopters, drones and dogs, in the search for six people swept away by flooded waterways.
Other teams are also searching for a missing man in neighboring Ardèche.
On Sunday afternoon, three victims were found dead while trying to cross submersible bridges over swollen rivers, swollen by the downpours that fell Saturday and overnight, sometimes worth more than of a month of rain in just 24 hours.
Also read: Disappeared in Gard after bad weather: “I just want to find my son and my grandchildren”
The three people still wanted in the Gard are a father and his two children, aged 4 and 13, swept away by the waves while they were trying to cross a submersible bridge over the Gardon at around 11:30 p.m. in Dions, a village of 500 residents north of Nîmes.
The mother, driving the vehicle at the time of the tragedy, was saved and is hospitalized.
The car was found, empty, downstream from the scene of the tragedy, emblematic of those that occurred during this episode linked to the passage of storm Monica.
Six departments still on orange alert
In the neighboring department of Ardèche, a man has also been missing since Saturday in the village of Saint-Martin-de-Valamas, following bad weather, the prefecture said.
According to a gendarmerie source, it is the manager of a hydroelectric power station who had gone to check its installation.
“My thoughts go out to the victims of the bad weather and their families, as well as to the people affected,” President Emmanuel Macron reacted in the evening on X (ex-Twitter).
Calling for “vigilance and () caution”, he stressed that “state services are mobilized to provide assistance and find our missing”.
Six departments are still on orange flood alert this Monday, according to the latest Météo France bulletin.
These are Charente-Maritime, Gironde, Puy-de-Dôme, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Saône-et-Loire and Yonne.
The Gironde is also for “waves-submersion”.
🔶 6 departments in Orange (https://t.co/CSYEovTI83) pic.twitter.com/76aQtmVMgu
— VigiMétéoFrance (@VigiMeteoFrance) March 11, 2024
Gard and six other departments were placed on orange alert on Saturday by Météo-France due to storm Monica.
The orange level is the third on a scale of four and calls on the public to be “very vigilant” due to “expected dangerous phenomena”.
It is particularly recommended to avoid traveling or approaching watercourses.
Despite the repetition of precautionary messages, "we still deplore behavior (...) dangerous, first of all for the people who expose themselves, also dangerous for the people whose duty it is to come to their aid", underlined the Gard prefecture, estimating that such an episode had not occurred in the department for ten years.