A weather alert was lifted on Thursday after floods and storms ravaged southern France, leaving five dead and a trail of devastation.
However as the clear-up began, more than a quarter of a million people were without drinking water, rivers remained at dangerously high levels, and road and rail travel was disrupted along a stretch of territory from the Pyrenees to the Italian border.
Around the country’s second city Marseille, which was declared a disaster zone on Wednesday as a result of torrential rain and winds of up to 150kph, thousands of people were returning to their homes after being evacuated to temporary shelter.
Stung by criticism that it failed to react quickly enough to last summer’s deadly heatwave, the government responded promptly to the state of emergency in the south, with President Jacques Chirac flying to the region on Wednesday and promising â,¬12-million in disaster relief.
But tough questions were being asked over whether urban planning policies had aggravated the effects of flash-flooding, and whether more should be done to slow down climate change — blamed by many for the apparently increasing rate of meteorological crises in France.
”We can easily see that climatic phenomena that used to be thought of as exceptional are now happening practically every year or at least at regular intervals. It obliges us to develop new and tougher policies,” said Ecology Minister Roselyne Bachelot, who accompanied Chirac.
The left-wing newspaper Liberation said successive governments bore a share of responsibility for environmental disasters.
”First because [disasters] are often aggravated by laxity or indifference to the environment in urbanisation policies and the management of natural spaces. And secondly because there is a scientific consensus that we are in a period of climate change,” it said.
”Governing is about looking ahead and anticipating, rather than pretending to have a cure by playing the fireman in front of the television cameras,” it said.
On Thursday about a quarter of a million people in the Gard region, around the city of Nimes, were told not to drink tap water because the flooding may have made it too contaminated to drink.
Local authorities issued new warnings for residents to stay at home, and school was cancelled in the Gard and Herault, which lie on eitther side of the river Rhone.
Firefighters in the Herault rescued two people from a tree, which they climbed to escape floodwaters after venturing out near the town of Valras.
”As the firefighters are charming folks, they even rescued a horse,” the local government office added.
Officials said the Rhone had reached levels not seen since the 19th century, with a flow measured at 13 000 cubic metres per second during the night. However, they said river levels across the region were beginning to fall on Thursday.
Road and rail traffic remained severely disrupted, with many routes submerged, and the reactors in two power plants were shut down because of floating debris in the river that threatened to clog cooling inlets.
On Wednesday tug boats were called in to control the decommissioned aircraft carrier the Clemenceau, which broke its moorings in the Mediterranean while waiting to be brought to port to be broken up. — Sapa-AFP