In the middle of the afternoon, the sky darkened, and as predicted by the orange alert announced by Météo France in the Var and Bouches-du-Rhône, Liters of water fell on Marseille in less than an hourcausing the flooding of many roads, particularly on Boulevard Schloesing and Boulevard Beaumarchais, an episode unprecedented in its violence since October 2021, according to local weather experts.
“It took over us straight away!”
On the Old Port, it is a spectacle of desolation in front of this ice cream seller. Diego cleans, a little desperate and above all disgusted, because Under the violence of the storm, the sewers of the district, as elsewhere in the city, overflowed : “It invaded us straight away, we had our hands in the sh…, with the wipes in one hand, but everything came back up, the sewers, the hair…“.
At the nearby OM Café, the manager, Alexandre, explains that he had to confine his customers for a while in the restaurant where the water rose at lightning speed : “Everything was flooded, the sewers came in very quickly, through the windows… It was very complicated!“.
On the Canebière, Maxime gives an already catastrophic assessment of the damage to his tobacco shop: “We tried to put down boards and we bailed out as much as possible, but it still flooded the machines and flooded the cellars, the whole place, you know…“. On the old port, this Wednesday evening, the sound of sirens resounded, with the firefighters’ pumps in the background, who responded to nearly 500 calls and carried out nearly fifty interventions.
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The 04/09/2024
Torrential rains in Marseille, flooded roads and stationary cars