Flood of the Gardon in Dions, in the Gard: after the discovery of the body of a man, searches continue to try to find two children aged 4 and 12

Ce lundi 11 mars, les sauveteurs en eaux vives restaient mobilisés. Mikael Anisset – Midi Libre

Dans la nuit du samedi 9 au dimanche 10 mars, leur voiture qui se trouvait sur un pont submersible a été emportée par des eaux torrentielles. La femme qui les accompagnait a pu, elle, être secourue in extremis par les sapeurs-pompiers. 

Interrupted during the night, operations actively resumed at 7 a.m. This Monday March 11 at the start of the morning, firefighters and police worked together to try to find a man and two children whose car was swept away in the flood of the Gardon on Saturday March 9 around 11:45 p.m. , while their vehicle was preparing to cross a submersible bridge in the town of Dions in Gard.

While the woman on board was able to be saved from the water by emergency services, the Citroën C3 Picasso – in which there were initially four ;people (a couple and two children aged 12 and 4 years old) – was found empty of its occupants in the bed of the Gardon in recession on Sunday March 10, around 5 p.m.

Identification in progress

Around 10 a.m. this Monday, more than 30 hours after the start of search operations, a lifeless body was found by emergency services. 

According to the first elements, it would be the corpse of a man, discovered entangled in branches 2 kilometers downstream of the car. vacuum found submerged the day before, and which could very possibly be his vehicle.

At 12:45 p.m., the body found had not yet been officially identified as that of the father of the two children still sought. The gendarmes carried out observations around the remains before extracting them from the scene. 

An operation which promised to be particularly complex "due to the topography of the site, which was difficult to access", indicated General Eric Chuberre, commander of the Gard Gendarmerie Group, who specified that at that time: "three people alive were still sought by the mobilized gendarmes and firefighters". 

Difficult progression

Since the same morning, the gendarmes have taken over from the firefighters in command of the operations which have gone from their initial "rescue” to that of "research" now under the joint direction of the public prosecutors of Alès and Nîmes.

In this new framework, the banks of the Gardon are raked up and down on land, but also from the air thanks to numerous drones and two helicopters, by 110 firefighters and 120 gendarmes supported by their dog crews. Operations taking place between the Dions submersible bridge where the car was swept away and the Saint-Nicolas bridge located 8 kilometers below in the commune of Sainte-Anastasie.

Coming in particular from Martigues and Vaucluse, white water rescuers completed this exceptional system. And carried out submerged prospecting where progress always remained, and despite the decline, very difficult due, among other things, to a strong current and particularly heavy opaque water in mud, and the presence of obstacles (plants, trunks and branches).

These exhausting but ultimately fruitless searches continued this Monday March 11 until 6 p.m.

While the hope of finding alive the two missing children aged 4 and 12 was dwindling by the hour, the search operations were to resume the next morning from 7:30 a.m.

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