International

10 dead as Cannes gets 2 months’ rain in hours

Published

9 years ago

October 5, 2015

Sudden heavy rains around the French Riviera have killed at least 10, including some trapped in cars, a campsite and a retirement home, and left six missing.
Helicopters patrolled the region to look for other victims and 27,000 homes were without electricity Sunday after the Brague River overflowed its banks and fierce thunderstorms poured more than 6.7 inches of rain on the Cannes region in two hours Saturday night.
That is the equivalent of two months of rainfall for the region, local radio France Bleu-Azur reported. President Francois Hollande and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve were heading to the retirement home Sunday morning.
Hollande said in a statement that people were killed in the towns of Cannes, Biot, Golfe-Juan, and Mandelieu-la-Napoule, not far from Italy.

The Interior Ministry said of the six missing that there was “little hope to find them alive.” Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet earlier said the death toll had reached 13; the reason for the lowered death toll and the exact circumstances of the deaths weren’t immediately clear.
Several trains were stopped because of flooded tracks, and traffic remained stopped along the coast between Nice and Toulon on Sunday morning. Several roads in the region were closed, including those to Cannes, which was particularly hard hit.
Winds and rain whipped palm trees along the famed Croisette seaside promenade in Cannes in images shown on television. In nearby Antibes, cars were overturned and roads were slick with mud.
The flooding also disrupted a French league soccer match in Nice, forcing the stadium to shut down in the middle of play.

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