France issues red flood alerts after ‘exceptional’ rainfall | France

France has issued red flood alerts in three departments as the aftermath of Storm Nils causes chaos across the country.

Floodwaters have inundated isolated homes and villages after the Garonne River overflowed, with hydrologists warning the rain is falling on soils that have reached record saturation levels.

Météo France said red flood alerts would remain in effect on Wednesday in Gironde, Lot-et-Garonne and Maine-et-Loire, but the number of departments on orange alert would drop from 14 to 12.

Monique Barbut, Minister for Ecological Transition, said a state of emergency – necessary to speed up the processing of insurance claims – would be declared once the floods were over.

“People who follow climate issues have been warning us for a long time that events like this are going to happen more and more often,” she said on Tuesday, the day after her visit to Gironde, devastated by floods, on the television news channel LCI. “Actually, tomorrow has arrived.”

Lucie Chadourne-Facon, director of Vigicrues, the French flood monitoring service, said the succession of rainy disruptions had been “exceptional” and that the ground was so full of water that just 20 to 30 mm of rain could trigger flooding.

“We are faced with two parallel phenomena,” she declared this weekend on the BFMTV channel.

“The fact that it is territorially widespread means that all the small rivers that reacted flow into the big rivers and everything swells through spread,” she said. “And at the same time, we still get rain which reactivates the flooding.”

Vigicrues said “damaging flooding” was underway on the Garonne downstream of Agen and was significant in the Marmande and Gironde regions. Even though water levels were slowly dropping after the weekend peaks, they were rising again on the lower Garonne.

Authorities expect significant flooding Tuesday afternoon on the Maine River – including the city of Angers – and overnight on the Loire in the Ponts-de-Cé sector. Water levels are expected to continue to rise throughout Wednesday.

The floods in France come after a series of storms hit Portugal and Spain, killing at least 16 people and forcing thousands to flee their homes.

Scientists have not yet conducted attribution studies to determine whether global warming has made flooding worse, but they point to a well-established relationship in physics showing that warm air can hold more moisture.

On Tuesday, EU scientific advisers urged Europe to prepare for a world 3°C warmer by the end of the century – double the level of global warming that world leaders promised to target under the 2015 Paris agreement – and to test even more extreme scenarios.

France’s national adaptation strategy, published last year, aims to prepare it for near-apocalyptic global warming of 4°C.

“We are now at a point where these events are happening at a speed and with a force that we have never seen before,” Barbut said on LCI. “Clearly, what we need to do now is put in place adaptation policies that will allow us to strengthen the resilience of our territories. »