The low-pressure system that drowned parts of eastern Spain has claimed two lives in France. One man died in Corsica, another in Provence, while torrential rain turned streets from Hérault to the outskirts of Marseille into rivers.
The Corsican victim had just done a kindness. Local paper Corse-Matin reports that the 65-year-old offered a lift to a woman stranded at the roadside near Ghisonaccia on Tuesday. Soon after, the swollen Fium’orbu river swept his four-by-four off the road towards Ghisoni. His passenger squeezed out of a window in time; he did not. White-water rescuers and a Puma helicopter searched for hours before he was found overnight beneath his car, several hundred metres downstream. Prosecutors have opened an inquiry.
The figures explain the violence of the water. Forecasters at Météo-France recorded almost 400 millimetres around Solenzara over the whole episode, and at its airport 191 millimetres came down within sixty minutes.
Provence mourns a second victim: a 75-year-old man, carried off by the water at Saint-Mitre-les-Remparts, whose body turned up in nearby Istres. Istres, some 50 kilometres from Marseille, moved flooded-out families into a gym. In Lunel, cars sat submerged to their windows and around fifteen people needed emergency shelter.
Travel suffered too. The A9 motorway near Nîmes closed for hours, trains were cancelled, and Marseille halted its trams on Tuesday morning while slip roads flooded. By midday the downpours had eased. In Spain, Adam had already killed at least four people.
