The tornado that crossed the Aude on Monday hit hardest around Pomas at about five in the afternoon, Météo-France told 20 Minutes, with winds above 117 kilometres an hour. By Tuesday morning the two people who had been missing overnight were accounted for: firefighters pulled them from the rubble of a house with light injuries, the civil protection spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Frédéric Arrault, said on RTL.
How many were hurt depends on which count you read. 20 Minutes reports 39 injured, the figure Le Monde also carries. BFMTV reports that 41 people were taken in hand and 15 taken to hospital. The two are not the same measure, and neither outlet reconciles them.
The rest of the damage is agreed. Six hundred people were evacuated from a village of a thousand. Three hundred houses were damaged, roofs torn off and walls brought down. Two shelters were opened for the night, one in Pomas itself and one in Limoux. Roads were still closed late in the evening, blocked by fallen trees and kept clear for the emergency services, and the prefecture said the search and checking would go on through the night. At half past seven, 2,800 households were without power across ten communes. Météo-France had put several departments of the south-west, the Aude among them, under an orange thunderstorm warning; it lifted the warning for the department at seven.
What is not settled is how strong the thing was. Tornadoes are almost never measured directly, because they rarely pass over an instrument. So the strength is read backwards out of the damage, on the Fujita scale drawn up in 1971, which runs from F0 for light damage to F5 for what it calls incredible damage. David Dumas, a meteorologist at the Keraunos observatory, described the method to 20 Minutes: every impact point is examined one by one — a roof built to take a certain wind, and how far short of that it failed — along with vegetation, and buildings as substantial as châteaux and churches. The work is done on the ground, and by drone and by aircraft. Where different points suggest different strengths, the higher one usually stands, because that is where the centre went through.
The Pomas tornado has not yet been classified. The same observatory has recorded six tornadoes in France this year, all of them force 1, and only two F5s in the country's whole record, in 1845 and in 1967. In the Aude, 17 tornadoes have been counted in the last 150 years, ten of them significant; the last F2 was in 1981 and the last F3 in 1969.
Nor could it have been called in advance with any precision. French tornadoes are at most a few tens of metres across, below the resolution of radar that scans by the kilometre, and they form and disappear too quickly for the forecast models. "All we can do at the moment is announce a percentage of risk over an area," Dumas said. For Pomas, he put that at between 30 and 40 percent — which, he said, is very high.
Why it is on the board
Top of Le Monde's most-read list when we collected, and on both BFMTV's and 20 Minutes' as well — five of the 29 French items we held were this storm. The three most-watched clips in the French video lens were all the same tornado.
The five entries divide the event between them rather than repeating it. Le Monde and BFMTV have the count of the injured and the missing; 20 Minutes has one piece on how a tornado gets graded and another on the lightning that came with the same system. One thing worth recording about that grading piece: its headline puts the risk at 40 percent while the quotation in its own text says between 30 and 40.
확인: BFMTV · 20 Minutes