Mayor attacks Météo France

NICE mayor Christian Estrosi and Alpes-Maritimes president Eric Ciotti both attacked Météo France for not having given proper warning of the intensity of the Côte-d'Azur storm that caused 17 deaths with four people missing.

The storm took just two hours to devastate large parts of Cannes-Mandelieu, Antibes and Biot but the two politicians said the forecaster’s use of yellow, orange and red alerts had been trivialised by overuse.

Mr Estrosi, who is standing to be president of PACA region in the forthcoming elections, said questions had to be asked on how Météo France worked.

The Riviera had only been on orange alert. But he added on Europe 1: “This was not an orange alert situation but a red alert: such a ferocity of storm, no one alerted us of that – or we would have told people to take precautions, to clear certain areas especially campsites.”

However, Météo France deputy operations director Pascal Brovelli told Le Mondetheir equipment did not allow them to “predict a phenomenon of such a scale and intensity and to localise it so precisely” which was “aggravated by a very high urbanisation”.

“What was exceptional was the intensity of the event which started in the Var and swept along the Alpes-Maritimes coast. In one hour at Cannes, between 20.00 and 21.00 we had 107mm of water – the previous record in the region was 70mm – and issuing a red alert then would have done nothing.

“We issued the orange alert at 11.00 in the morning and warned of rainfall of between 60mm and 100mm and locally up to 150mm.”

In all, between 19.00 and 22.00 180mm of rain fell on Cannes, 159mm at Mandelieu, 100mm at Valbonne and Biot and 90mm at Nice.

Mr Brovelli said that climate change would mean that similar storms would occur more often in the future as they were caused by warm and most Mediterranean air meeting the cold continental air mass and causing intense precipitation.