Wet wet wet

Meteo France had announced another épisode cévénol, so we were on orange alert, and just before I went to bed I glanced at the local forecast on Meteociel. Did a double take on noting that it predicted around 60 mm of rain between 2 and 8 am, and winds of up to 75 kph. Decided Mystère had better stay indoors, so got his rarely used litter tray out.

It certainly did rain heavily during the night -- I heard it drumming on the roof in the small hours -- but the advertised wind was absent. Which turned out to be a bad thing -- the storm remained stationary for hours, dumping five months' worth of rain in the area around Carcassonne.

Funnily enough, when you're in the middle of these events you're not always aware of the extent of them. In the famous floods of November 1999, we had a powercut for two days and were quite unaware of the havoc wreaked around us. Today, by 10 a.m. it was no longer raining and there were even bits of blue sky poking through the clouds. So I did another double take on checking the local paper's website and seeing a headline about six dead, plus videos of scenes of destruction.

After passing by our garden (underwater again -- we couldn't actually get into it, see second extra) we ventured further to look at the river (see first extra) -- the level had already dropped by maybe three metres at this point. Met a number of people doing the same, so we caught up on news -- the water had gone over the top of the 8-metre high bridge in Ribaute, as it did in 1999. In fact the water level was even higher than in 1999. It's interesting to see how much less damage there is in our village than there was then, largely thanks to the flood prevention works that were carried out after that. Very little water in the streets, because it's caught by flood reservoirs higher up (in our village floods are run-off from the mountain rather than overflowing rivers).

Still, the damage and loss of life in other places nearer Carcassonne is terrible. This afternoon S went to help out some acquaintances who live downstream of the bridge in Ribaute. They must have lost count of the number of times they've been flooded by now. They were only alerted at 6 a.m., and by 7 the river had arrived. So their afternoon was spent chucking ruined stuff out, and their car is a write-off.

Meanwhile my busy evening is now a very quiet one, as both meetings I was going to have been postponed due to the weather.