France: after the storm, the Alpes-Maritimes in shock
The village of Breil-sur-Roya.
RFI / Alexis Bedu
Text by: RFI Follow
4 min
Emmanuel Macron is going to the Alpes-Maritimes this Wednesday, October 7, 2020. For the moment, 5,000 homes are still without electricity four days after the passage of storm Alex.
According to a still provisional assessment, four people died.
Eight are also missing.
Two deaths were also recorded in Italy.
As a result of the bad weather, villages remained isolated and on site the emergency services continued with the evacuations.
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With our special correspondent in Breil-sur-Roya,
Alexis Bedu
The sun has returned to this region north of Nice.
This facilitates the cleaning work and the reestablishment of contact with the most isolated villages.
We are in the mountains, the roads are winding, and the storm has hit hard.
The wind blew away the roofs.
The rain that fell en masse caused the various rivers to flood.
Destroying roads and houses, taking away trees, cars.
And now, what future?
What future for this Roya valley?
Patrick Ladic runs a garage along the river.
he is pessimistic: "
I no longer see a future, before I worked a lot with the passage, now there is no more passage, there is no more road there is nothing, how many years will it take to rebuild all this?
It might be rebuilt if our president is willing to help the valley, so let's hope we get help.
It's terrible, it's catastrophic.
Already, there were not many people but there with the Covid we had already taken a good slap, all the traders, we are limited, we live with our personal funds and here imagine that, what I do ?
"
Present among the volunteers, Eric, an inhabitant of Breil-sur-Roya, one of the villages most affected by the storm, recounts this surrealist episode: “We
regularly see the river rise and when we were told that we were on red vigilance we said
to ourselves
"good it's as usual it will go up and then it will pass"
so, frankly the next time we are going to tell us that we have red vigilance, there I think we will 'organize.
"
A "
dead valley
"?
“
Even I
,” he said,
“got caught living next door.
I have my fence that just blew up;
at one point I wanted to act to avoid too much damage, we have a 40 kilo table, it flew in two seconds, it fell back, if it had fallen on me ... it would be missed.
There, they are evacuating everyone because I think the winter will be hard and we cannot leave people in villages where we do not know if there will be electricity. constantly.
So they repatriate as many people as possible who are sensitive and fragile in order to protect the population as much as possible.
But afterwards, in my opinion, it will be a dead valley, I don't know, but I have that feeling, afterwards I hope I'm wrong.
"
This Wednesday, October 7, Emmanuel Macron is in Breil-sur-Roya where the emergency services are centralized.
He also went to Tende, where today it is impossible to go by land;
it is a hilltop village of about 2,000 inhabitants and where many of them are still stranded.
Nearly 600 military firefighters are still at work here, evacuating the most fragile people, refueling, clearing, a mobilization of State resources particularly welcomed by the inhabitants of this disaster area.
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