schools will remain closed Monday and Tuesday in 279 municipalities

2023-11-12 13:53:20
Aerial view of the village of Esquerdes under water, Saturday November 11, 2023 in Pas-de-Calais. ANTHONY BRZESKI / AFP

Schools will remain closed Monday and Tuesday in 279 municipalities in Pas-de-Calais due to flooding affecting the department, the prefecture announced on Sunday in a press release. These closures concern “crèches (with the exception of hospital crèches), nursery schools, primary schools, middle schools and high schools”she clarified.

The red flood alert was lifted on Sunday morning in Pas-de-Calais, thanks to a lull in the weather during the weekend, but the department remains under water and the return of rains at the end of day raises fears of a new difficult episode.

The return of bad weather is feared with anxiety by a population at the end of its nerves, which has already suffered from storm Ciaran on November 2, record floods on Tuesday and intense rains on Thursday and Friday.

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Around 250 municipalities have been or are still affected by flooding, sometimes in dramatic conditions, particularly around Saint-Omer, Boulogne and Montreuil, according to the Pas-de-Calais prefecture. There have been four minor injuries since Monday in the department, according to the prefecture. A sixty-year-old also died in Bailleul (North) at the wheel of her car, found full of water on Saturday in a flooded ditch, an accident “probably linked to the fact that the road was flooded, that she did not see the route clearly”, according to the Dunkirk public prosecutor’s office. But he is not ” Not possible “ to establish a link with certainty “before the physical examination”.

Although they constitute natural phenomena, floods, cyclones and droughts can be amplified by global warming generated by human activities. Floods are particularly costly disasters: between 1970 and 2019, they accounted for 44% of all disasters and 31% of economic losses.

The World with AFP