Some 33,000 households in the Rhône-Alpes remained without electricity Sunday early evening after the heavy snowfall on Thursday, including that of a couple, found dead by poisoning due to a generator. They were 70,000 earlier at midday.
"More than 90% of homes have recovered electricity thanks to the mobilization of Enedis teams and companies working and pruning partners from all over France," said in a latest bulletin the electricity network manager Enedis . The areas that remain without power are still located in the Drôme, Isère, Ardèche, Loire and Rhône, where some 2,200 agents and several hundred generators have been deployed.
Several cases of intoxication due to generators
"It's difficult today to communicate an end of crisis," said a spokesman for the company, questioned about the possibility of a quick return to normal. "We adapt according to the specificities of the territories.On the area concerned, the last we had so many problems, it was for the storm of 1999," he added.
Sunday morning, a fatal case of carbon monoxide poisoning, was reported in Isère where a couple of septuagenarians, deprived of electricity because of the last snowy episode, was found dead at his home in Beauvoir-de-Marc, because of a generator set in the garage of the house, said judicial and prefectural sources.
This deadly carbon monoxide poisoning in the department is added to the non-lethal poisoning of eight other people on Saturday. In Ardèche and Drôme, more than twenty people including children who were hospitalized for headaches and vomiting after trying an alternative means of heating for lack of power.