“I am teleworking today but since I live in Esquirol, near the Garonne, I absolutely wanted to come and see the rising river this morning,” says Annabelle, a Toulouse resident. It is always impressive to see the tree trunks and the waste carried by the Garonne ”. Tuesday morning, many people from Toulouse flocked to the Pont Neuf to admire and photograph the significant flow of the Garonne, which reached its peak at around 6 a.m., according to Vigicrues.
After the torrential rains on Monday which caused many rivers to overflow and the snowmelt in the Pyrenees, the river reached a height of 4.31 m at Pont Neuf, less than the 4.38 m recorded in June 2000. Tuesday morning, the stairs of the Place Saint-Pierre, as well as part of the Place de la Daurade, were under water.
It is the second strongest flood for forty years but it remains far from the record of 1875 when the river reached 8 m.
Monday evening, the Haute-Garonne firefighters found in a ditch filled with water in Merville, north of Toulouse, the body of a septuagenarian missing since the morning.
If the decline has timidly started since 7:30 am this Tuesday, the night from Monday to Friday was lively for the 720 students of the Daniel Faucher university campus, installed on the island of Ramier, who were evacuated Monday evening for prevention in the face of the rising waters. About 120 of them spent the night in a gymnasium. Only the inhabitants of the Ile du Ramier were able to stay at home, the Casino Barrière, for its part, closed at 8 p.m.
According to a report from the prefecture, the firefighters carried out 119 interventions on Monday evening. Météo France is maintaining orange flood and flood vigilance on Tuesday in eight departments in the southwest, including Hautes-Pyrénées, Haute-Garonne, Gers, Tarn-et-Garonne and Lot in Occitanie.
