Broken trees, upturned towers… Storm Domingos swept through France this weekend, leaving at least eight people injured, a day after an Enidis agent died on Saturday in Brittany following the violent storm Ciarán.
This new autumn depression in three days, accompanied by very violent winds of up to 152 km/h in Lège-Cap-Ferret (Gironde) or 144 km/h in Cognac (Charentes), crossed the entire country during the night. From Saturday to Sunday, causing serious damage on the west coast, from the Vendée to Landais via Poitou-Charentes.
“We had gusty winds of 150 kilometers per hour last night,” Benoit Dumo, curator of the Banc d’Arguin (Gironde) nature reserve located in the Cap-Ferret extension, told AFP.
“It is a storm rarely seen here. It has been a few years since we have seen one like this. It was very violent,” he said, describing a powerful wave that submerged part of this sandbank formed at the entrance to Arcachon. A basin facing the famous Pilat Dunes.
An orange flood warning remains in effect on Sunday at 10:00pm in eight provinces, where it will also be maintained on Monday due to heavy rain expected overnight. These are Charente, Charente-Maritime, Corrèze, Dordogne, Gironde, Deux Sèvres, Vienne, and Pas-de-Calais, which will also be on orange flood alert on Monday.
Collisions
However, Hurricane Domingos was presented as “less dangerous” than its predecessor by Météo-France, as it struck areas that had already been hit three days before Hurricane Ciaran passed, killing at least three people and injuring 47 others.
On Sunday, the death toll in Domingos reached at least eight injured, including two firefighters from Deux Sèvres and Vienne.
Among the other injured, one was injured by a falling tree in La Rochelle (Charentes-Maritime), according to the municipality, and two others in Deux Sèvres: a man who fell on a motorcycle and a person. Who fell from a tree branch, according to authorities.
The prefecture said that three people were injured in Charente in collisions with trees thrown on the road.
On the vast Atlantic coast extending from the Vendée to Landes, emergency services have increased their interventions.
In Rochefort (Charente-Maritime), a tree fell on the symbolic roundabout in Colbert Square, according to an Agence France-Presse photographer.
In Corsica, the Tavignano flood destroyed the Paleri bridge in Corte, according to the prefecture.
Fatal accident
Another 114,000 homes remained without power in Brittany and Normandy after Storm Ciaran, said Enidis, who reported at 7:00pm that just 46,200 additional customers were plunged into darkness after Domingos passed through New Aquitaine. Compared to 145,000 in the morning.
Specifically during the intervention to regain power, a 46-year-old Enidis agent, who had come as reinforcements from Occitanie, died on Saturday evening.
The accident occurred at around 7:15 pm on Saturday in Pont-Aven (Finistère). According to the first elements of the investigation, this man in his forties died from an electric shock while dealing with damaged cables, according to the Gendarmerie Forces and the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Quimper, which opened an investigation to determine the circumstances of the death.
As a result of inclement weather, transportation was severely disrupted during the final weekend of the Halloween holiday.
Two trains on the Paris-Orléans-Limoges-Toulouse (POLT) line experienced major delays and their passengers had to spend the night at the station or on board the carriages, according to SNCF.
The start of the school year is expected to be complicated in Brittany on Monday, as the region announced in a press release that 10 out of 115 public secondary schools will not be able to reopen due to damage sustained. In Finistère, there are nine public colleges also involved, as well as four private colleges and a Diwan (teaching in the Breton language).
In Europe, the storm left at least 20 people dead, including two in Belgium, one in Madrid, one in Germany, one in the Netherlands, seven in Italy, two in Bulgaria, and four in a shipwreck in Portugal.
Although they are natural phenomena, floods, hurricanes and droughts can be exacerbated by human-induced global warming.
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