The resources deployed are immense.

Faced with bad weather in the South-East of France, more than 300 firefighters, gendarmes and other rescuers in total were mobilized on Sunday March 10 in Gard, with boats, helicopters, drones and dogs.

Police were looking for six people who were swept away while trying to drive across bridges over swollen rivers.

But the search cannot continue at night, "because given the situation of the waterways, the intervention is extremely dangerous", the deputy departmental director of the Gard firefighters, Thierry Carret, told AFP in Dions. .

The device will be “put back in place (Monday) morning and recalibrated according to the drop in watercourses,” he explained.

The three people still wanted in the Gard are a father and his two children, aged 4 and 13, swept away by the waves while they were trying to cross a submersible bridge over the Gardon at around 11:30 p.m. in Dions, a village of 500 residents north of Nîmes.

The 40-year-old mother was saved and hospitalized.

The car was found, empty, downstream from the scene of the tragedy, emblematic of those that occurred during this episode linked to the passage of storm Monica.

The three victims already found dead in the Gard had also tried to cross submersible bridges over the swollen rivers, swollen by the downpours which fell on Saturday and during the night, sometimes worth more than a month of rain in just 24 hours.

Rescuers on a boat on the Gardon to search for missing people, March 10, 2024 in Russan, in the Gard © CLEMENT MAHOUDEAU / AFP

The first lifeless body was found a few hundred meters from where a car, with two people of Belgian nationality, was swept away by the waves on Saturday around 6:45 p.m. in Gagnières, a village in the north of the department.

The vehicle had taken a bridge when the road had been closed by the municipality and a country guard had directly asked the driver not to enter it.

One of the two people on board the vehicle managed to get out, before being recovered by rescuers after more than two hours clinging to branches.

The two men lived in Gagnières, the prefecture told AFP.

Emergency call

In Goudargues, 1,100 inhabitants, in the north of Gard near Ardèche, rescuers found two bodies in a car.

They were conducting searches there after an emergency call received around 5 a.m. Sunday from two motorists saying they were in difficulty.

A Civil Security helicopter flies over the Gardon to search for missing people, on March 10, 2024 in Russan, in the Gard © CLEMENT MAHOUDEAU / AFP

According to the first elements of the investigation, cited by the Gard prefecture, the car would have been occupied by two women, aged 47 and 50, who were going to Spain.

In the neighboring department of Ardèche, a man has also been missing since Saturday in the village of Saint Martin de Valamas, following bad weather, the prefecture said.

According to a gendarmerie source, it is the manager of a hydroelectric power station who had gone to check its installation.

“The Nation stands united,” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal reacted on  

Our compatriots in Gard and Ardèche are facing very severe flooding and bad weather.



We currently have at least 7 people missing, including two children.

I share the pain and concerns of their loved ones.

The Nation stands united…

— Gabriel Attal (@GabrielAttal) March 10, 2024

“My thoughts go out to the victims of the bad weather and their families, as well as to the people affected,” President Emmanuel Macron reacted in the evening on X (ex-Twitter).

Calling for “vigilance and () caution”, he stressed that “state services are mobilized to provide assistance and find our missing”.

“There was torrential rain”

Gard and six other departments were placed on orange alert on Saturday by Météo-France due to storm Monica.

The orange level is the third on a scale of four and calls on the public to be "very vigilant", due to "expected dangerous phenomena".

It is particularly recommended to avoid traveling or approaching watercourses.

Despite the repetition of precautionary messages, "we still deplore behavior (...) dangerous, first of all for the people who expose themselves, also dangerous for the people whose duty it is to come to their aid", said underlined the Gard prefecture, estimating that such an episode had not occurred in the department for ten years.

“There was torrential rain yesterday, it was impressive, a historic level. I stayed at home because with the water, you must not tempt the devil, it can be dangerous,” he testified to AFP Pascale Fuchs, resident of Dions where roads are still closed.

The surroundings of a submersible bridge under the waters of the Gardon after heavy rains, March 10, 2024 in Dions, in the Gard © CLEMENT MAHOUDEAU / AFP

Eight departments are still on orange flood alert (Ardèche, Bouches-du-Rhône, Charente-Maritime, Gard, Gironde, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Var, Yonne) and should remain so until Monday, Météo-France indicated in its bulletin from 4:00 p.m. Sunday.

With AFP

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