Deadly Storms Strike France
France rushed in soldiers and sent helicopters Monday to aid rescue workers battling floods and torrential rains that killed at least 12 people and forced more than 1,000 others to evacuate their homes.
Train services were suspended across parts of southern France around the storm-battered Gard region. Violent rainstorms caused rivers to burst their banks, closed roads, flooded a hospital and cut electricity in some 40,000 homes, officials said.
The army dispatched 300 soldiers and eight armored vehicles capable of circulating in deep water to join 500 rescue workers in clearing roadways and assisting stranded drivers. Helicopters ferried hundreds of people to safety. Authorities declared a state of alert through Tuesday morning in the Gard and nearby Herault and Vaucluse regions.
At least 10 people were killed and four others were missing in the Gard. The dead included a father and his two children. The area around Nimes, a town with well-known Roman monuments, was among the hardest hit.
A bolt of lightning killed a man in the Vaucluse region, east of the Gard. To the southwest, in the Herault region, a 43-year-old firefighter died from injuries sustained after rescuing a couple trapped in their car by rising floodwaters.
Flooding closed roads and highways, particularly in the Gard and Vaucluse where all roads were deemed unsafe. The National Center of Road Information urged residents to stay off the roads until further notice.
High-speed TGV trains traveling between Paris and Marseille were delayed for several hours. Delays in other rail traffic stretched to up to five hours, the SNCF state railways said.
In Orange, northeast of Nimes, a senior citizens' home was evacuated as the waters rose and schools closed for the day.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy headed to the region Monday night for an emergency meeting with officials in Nimes.
In the Gard, 1,100 people from more than a dozen communities were moved to temporary shelters set up by the Red Cross and local mayors' offices, said Pierre-Alexandre Teuile, a regional official. More than 250 people were evacuated by helicopter.
In some areas, the equivalent of several months of rain fell in 24 hours.
The storms were exceptional not only in their intensity but also because they "stayed for hours over the same areas and in the fact that the region affected was very spread out," Bernard Strauss, director of forecasting for the national weather service, said on LCI television.
The rains began to ease Monday evening and the weather service, Meteo France, lifted its storm alerts for the affected regions.