A 55-year-old woman was found dead in her vehicle in the Côtes-d’Armor, a French department affected on Sunday and Monday morning by strong precipitation. The departments in the south-east of the country have undergone material damage after thunderstorm rains.
The victim in Brittany died in Ploumagoar shortly after seven in the morning, said the prefecture of Côtes-d’Armor. This woman “embarked on a flooded road and she found herself blocked in her vehicle”. According to the mayor of Ploumagoar Yannick Echevest, the road on which the fifties found itself swam was not closed to traffic.
Blocked in her vehicle, the victim was able to call a colleague from the Auguste-Pavaie-Pavil high school in Guingamp, where she worked as a maintenance agent, who warned the emergency services, reported the elected official. “The firefighters alert was given fairly quickly, but then it had to be found in the dark. (…) The time the help has come, it was too late, “he detailed.
Météo-France had placed the Breton department on orange vigilance for rain-rumming until Monday 10:00 am, “cumulative rain equivalent to more than a month of precipitation (being) expected”, according to a bulletin of the meteorological agency.
The firefighters received 1,500 calls, intervened more than 400 times and the gendarmerie “managed 27 interventions,” said the prefecture, which provided for around 8:00 am a return to “normal in almost all of the department”.
Orange vigilance
In the south of France, four departments (Bouches-du-Rhône, Vaucluse, Drôme and Var) were in orange vigilance for rain-rude and/or thunderstorms on Sunday.
In the Bouches-du-Rhône, firefighters carried out more than 760 interventions on Sunday, or “more than 70% compared to normal”. In the north of the department, he fell two months of rain in 24 hours, they said.
In the Var, which experienced record levels of precipitation on Sunday evening for the coastal municipalities like Toulon, the emergency services are still mobilized on Monday to “comb the cellars, the garages and be sure that we did not miss victims,” said prefect Simon Babre in the morning.
In total, the firefighters carried out more than 165 interventions in the Var in the face of bad weather.
