Aid is organized after the flood.
Supported by the army, the relief efforts intensified their efforts, Sunday, October 4, to try to find the missing and to come to the aid of the victims of the "extraordinary" floods which cut off from the world several villages in the South-East of France, after the passage of the storm Alex.
The human toll is likely to increase: the body of a French shepherd missing in the region of the Col de Tende has been found in the Roya River, Italian firefighters and civil protection announced on Sunday.
"What we are experiencing is extraordinary, we are used to seeing images of such disasters on other continents, with a certain detachment sometimes, and this is something that touched us," said the prefect on Sunday. of the Alpes-Maritimes Bernard Gonzalez.
Cars lying in the bed of the river, houses swallowed up by mud ... Breil-sur-Roya, near the Italian border, offered, Sunday morning, the face of a devastated city.
Throughout the Nice hinterland, as in neighboring northern Italy, roads have been destroyed, dozens of houses have been washed away, wastewater treatment plants destroyed.
Piedmont and Liguria soon in a state of emergency?
The Italian regions of Piedmont and Liguria have asked the Italian government to declare a state of emergency.
In France, the state launched the "natural disaster" procedure.
Sunday, the rescue effort - a thousand firefighters reinforced by helicopters and army personnel among others on the French side - will be "major and priority" in the Roya valley, on the border with Italy, said the representative of the State.
"All day the ballet of helicopters will resume, we will concentrate the air forces on Roya", he assured, not hiding however his "concern about the weather" with rains announced during the day.
The connections remain very difficult even by telephone in many valleys of the Nice hinterland.
The prefecture has announced the dispatch, in each of the isolated municipalities, of a soldier, a firefighter and a prefecture official to come to the aid of the mayors.
The town hall of Nice has mobilized accommodation centers as well as air resources to deliver meals and thousands of liters of water to isolated towns such as Saint-Martin-Vésubie.
It also launched an emergency disaster relief fund.
"Vive concern" on the final balance sheet
SNCF, which restored all of its lines in the sector on Saturday, with the exception of the Nice-Breil-Tende line, announced that it had transported 3,000 bottles of water by train to Breil-sur-Roya, d 'where she brought disaster victims to Nice.
The French Prime Minister, Jean Castex, did not hide, Saturday, "his deep concern" on the final balance sheet of these exceptional bad weather whereas the image of the devastation is not yet complete.
Many people are in fact wanted in the Alpes-Maritimes by the authorities because they have not given any news since Friday evening.
"But I want to send a message of hope about these people", indicated the prefect Bernard Gonzalez: "It is not because relatives could not give news that they were carried away by storm".
Saturday evening, 21 people who were declared missing by the Italian authorities were thus found safe and sound on the French side, near the Tende pass.
With AFP
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