This Friday, January 5, Météo France lifted the red alert for Pas-de-Calais where the recession is slowly beginning.
After four days of red vigilance for the risk of flooding, Pas-de-Calais returns to orange vigilance with the North, the Ardennes and the Meuse, this Friday, January 5. For its part, Vigicrues also placed the Aa river on orange alert and announced in its morning bulletin that “the decline began during the night from Wednesday to Thursday”. The organization nevertheless specified that precipitation is expected this Friday in Hauts-de-France which could “slow down the decline”. Even if increases in the water level can occur but without “reaching Wednesday’s levels”, as Vigicrues specifies. This new episode of flooding in the department caused a total of 710 evacuations according to figures from the prefecture announced Thursday evening. Visiting Pas-de-Calais this Thursday, the Minister of Ecological Transition, Christophe Béchu, declared given the scale of the disaster: “In an exceptional situation, exceptional responses”.
In order to accelerate the decline, intensive pumping resources were put in place as of Thursday, January 4. In the surroundings of the town of Mardyck in the North, four civil security pumps have been installed. Material from Europe was also received with eight pumps sent from the Netherlands, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Civil security told Agence France Presse that these pumps should be in operation from this Friday as part of the European Union’s civil protection mechanism.
The spokesperson for civil security, Commander Frédéric Harrault, declared that from Friday “when all the pumps have arrived and are in use, we should reach a maximum capacity of 60 million liters per hour, (.. .) which will be discharged by means of 18 pumps operated simultaneously. Once the water is pumped, it will be released into the sea or into canals. This Thursday, journalist Nicolas Chateauneuf explained on the set of 8 p.m. on France2 that in a similar context “these super-powerful pumps have sucked up the water that stagnates on flat ground to transfer it into canals which will evacuate it towards the sea”.
