While the bodies of the father and one of the couple’s two children were discovered on Monday and Tuesday, the victims’ mother and grandmother expressed her anger on March 12.
The emotion is palpable in Gard. This Tuesday, March 12, the body of a little girl was discovered in the waters of the Gardon at midday. The victim corresponds to the 4-year-old girl who had been missing since Sunday, after her family’s car was trapped by the floods that occurred in the department during the passage of storm Monica. The family, made up of two parents and two children, was returning from dinner at their grandmother’s when their vehicle found itself trapped by water as it crossed a submersible bridge. Only the mother was able to be rescued when emergency services arrived on site.
This Tuesday, the mother of the father, and therefore grandmother of the children, Christiane, spoke at length to BFMTV. Saying she was optimistic about the fate of her 13-year-old grandson, still wanted, the grandmother also expressed her anger. According to her, her daughter-in-law, who was driving at the time of the incident, is not a reckless person. Furthermore, and still according to her, the mother would never have used the bridge if the barrier had been correctly closed. “This is not true,” she again assured our colleagues, returning to the information according to which the bridge was closed at 11 p.m. And added: “It was only closed at a quarter to midnight! My son would never have taken this bridge with his two children on board and his partner, if it had been closed.” The grandmother has already assured BFMTV that she intends to go all the way, if it ever becomes necessary to file a complaint against the State in particular.
While the two children remained untraceable this Tuesday morning, the search to try to find them resumed for the third day in a row, around 8 a.m., after stopping operations overnight. The search took place along the Gardon, downstream of Dions, a village of 500 inhabitants north of Nîmes, near where the car sheltering the children was swept away by the waters. “The vehicle of the missing was found downstream of the submersible bridge” on Sunday, the prefect of Gard sur X revealed on Monday.
The search was more likely to be successful this Tuesday, according to Gard firefighters spokesperson, Michel Cherbetian, contacted by AFP. The man explained that the water level had fallen again, returning the Gardon to a usual level and allowing “refinement of the search”, particularly in areas which remained inaccessible or submerged on Monday. During floods, missing people can be carried by rivers several tens of kilometers and be found further away, the firefighter said. However, the man did not rule out the possibility of not finding the two children.
