France has issued red alerts for flooding in three départements as the aftermath of Storm Nils causes chaos across the country.
Flood waters have inundated homes and isolated villages after the Garonne River overflowed its banks, with hydrologists warning that rain is falling on soils that have hit record-breaking levels of saturation.
Météo France said red flood alerts would remain in place on Wednesday in Gironde, Lot-et-Garonne and Maine-et-Loire but the number of counties under orange alert would fall from 14 to 12.
Monique Barbut, minister for the ecological transition, said a state of emergency – necessary to fast-track insurance claims – would be declared once the floods had ended.
“People who follow climate issues have been warning us for a long time that events like this will happen more often,” she said on Tuesday, the day after visiting the flood-stricken Gironde region, in comments to TV news channel LCI. “In fact, tomorrow has arrived.”
Lucie Chadourne-Facon, director of Vigicrues, France’s flood monitoring service, said the succession of rainy disturbances had been “exceptional” and that soils were so full of water that as little as 20-30mm of rainfall could trigger floods.
“We are dealing with two parallel phenomena,” she told broadcaster BFMTV at the weekend.
“The fact that it is territorially widespread means … all the little rivers that have reacted are flowing into big rivers and everything swells by propagation,” she said. “And at the same time, we’re still getting rain that is reactivating the flooding.”
Vigicrues said “damaging flooding” was under way on the Garonne River downstream from Agen and was significant in the Marmande and Gironde regions. Although water levels had been slowly receding after weekend peaks, they were rising again on the lower Garonne.
Officials expect major flooding on Tuesday afternoon on the Maine River – including the city of Angers – and during the night on the Loire River in the Ponts-de-Cé area. Water levels are expected to keep rising throughout Wednesday.
France’s floods come after a series of storms have battered Portugal and Spain, leaving at least 16 dead and forcing thousands to flee their homes.
Scientists have not yet conducted attribution studies to determine if global heating worsened the floods, but they point to a well-established relationship in physics showing that warm air can hold more moisture.
On Tuesday, the EU’s scientific advisers urged Europe to prepare for a world that is 3C hotter by the end of the century – double the level of global heating that world leaders promised to aim for under the 2015 Paris agreement – and stress-test even more extreme scenarios.
France’s national adaptation strategy, published last year, seeks to prepare it for a near-apocalyptic 4C of global warming.
“We are now at a point where these events are occurring at a speed and with a force that we have never seen before,” Barbut told LCI. “Clearly, what we need to do now is to put adaptation policies in place that will enable us to build resilience in our territories.”
