Deadly bad weather in the Gard: record rainfall totals… which were added to those of the previous week

Deux mois et demi de pluie en quelques heures… Midi Libre – MiKAEL ANISSET

Évaluation de la pluviométrie, niveaux de vigilance… : y a-t-il des choses à revoir ?

Clearly, the rainy episode of this Saturday March 9 was exceptional. For the Gard prefecture, Nîmes alone, it constitutes a record: 112 mm recorded at the Nîmes-Courbessac station between March 9 and 10, the equivalent of two and a half months of rain.< /p>

On a single day of rain, the monthly rainfall record for March was broken for Nîmes-Courbessac. It actually fell 104 mm on the day of the 9th, compared to 87 mm on March 30, 1948, indicates Julien Sugier of Espacemeteo.fr

Beyond Nîmes, between March 9 and 10, we recorded 240 mm in Vigan, 170 mm in La Grand-Combe, 145 mm in Méjannes-le-Clap, 115 mm in Uzès and 64 mm in Pont-Saint- Spirit.

Would the rainy episode of March 9 and 10 have been underestimated in the weather forecasts ? "This precipitation corresponds exactly to the forecast issued by Météo France and the level of vigilance regarding these forecasts. The alerts issued correspond exactly to what we observed in terms of overflow", we indicate from the prefecture. Alix Roumagnac, for Predict, a subsidiary of Météo France, confirms: "L& #39;event was not undervalued. The episode had been announced for quite some time. The difficulty was assessing the rain/snow limit." 

The Roach remained on yellow alert

Julien Sugier, from Météo Gard, nevertheless asks himself questions: "In the end, there is orange vigilance for the Cèze upstream (then downstream the next day, Editor's note), but for the Roach, we stayed in yellow. We may have minimized the episode of the previous weekend, when it had already rained a lot on the Gard plains… "

"The levels of vigilance respond to thresholds, tempers Alix Roumagnac. The regret is that Gard was very upstream on the risk culture. Unfortunately this weekend, the risk culture did not work."