"It was shaking, it was fast, a handful of seconds", as explained at the microphone of Europe 1 Aurélie, resident of the region of Montélimar who was struck Monday morning by a strong earthquake of magnitude 5.4. "At home, nothing came down, but I had friends who had a lot of things broken at home, and at my parents' house, the chairs and the table moved," she said on our website. antenna. Not everyone in the area was so lucky. If there is no major damage, as indicated by the local authorities, there are four wounded, including one serious. And several buildings were damaged, particularly in Teil, a town located on the outskirts of Montelimar.
Guest of Nathalie Lévy in your big evening newspaper, the seismologist and physicist at the Institute of the Globe of Strasbourg Mustapha Meghraoui reminded some basic instructions following this rare event. "Damaged buildings should be avoided, because if there is a replica that reaches 3.5 to 4.5, it can further damage buildings that are already weakened," he said, pointing out however it was "unlikely that there will be a replica of a magnitude that will exceed 4.5".
"Ongoing verifications on nuclear sites"
In Montélimar, a person was seriously injured after the fall of a scaffolding. She was rushed to the hospital in absolute urgency, said the prefecture of Drôme. The earthquake was felt in a large area of southern France, in the Drôme and Ardèche, so, but also in Lyon in the north and Montpellier and Marseille in the south.
This earthquake, on the other hand, provoked "no visible damage" on the nuclear sites of the region. But EDF must still calculate the exact impact of the earthquake, said the Nuclear Safety Agency (ASN). "There are ongoing audits (and) we have asked EDF for its two nuclear power plants, in accordance with the procedures, to verify that the reactors should not be stopped in order to carry out further checks," said the director of nuclear power plants at ASN, Rémy Catteau.