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Paris / AFP
The rain-swollen River Seine in Paris receded for the first time in a week after nearing its highest level in three decades, triggering a scramble to save artworks in riverside museums.
The Seine stood at 6.06 metres above normal levels at 8:00am, down from a high of 6.10 metres overnight, the environment ministry’s Vigicrues flood watch website said. The level was the same as that recorded on Friday afternoon, when the river rose to levels last seen in 1982, prompting emergency measures.
The famed Louvre and Orsay museums shut their doors in a race to move art treasures from their basements, some metro stations were closed and Parisians were advised to stay away from the Seine.
But by Saturday, as authorities were counting the cost of over a week of flooding in central and northern France, the spectre of devastating floods in the city had begun to ebb. “We’re now in the stabilisation phase, even if we could still get one or two centimetres more,” said Bruno Janet, head of modelling at Vigicrues.
The environment ministry on Friday forecast that the Seine would remain high throughout the weekend—but still far off a 1910 record of 8.62 metres—before starting to subside. Across Europe, at least 17 people have been killed in floods that have trapped people in their homes and forced rescuers to row lifeboats down streets turned into rivers.
Metro stations sandbagged
The City of Paris said it had opened two gyms to provide shelter for the homeless.
On Saturday, pieces of driftwood, plastic bags and other flotsam swirled in the muddy waters which had inundated the city’s famous tree-lined riverside walkways, a popular haunt of strolling couples.
Firefighters warned people to keep away from dangerous parts of the river, but crowds gathered undeterred on Pont Neuf and other iconic bridges to snap pictures of the fast-flowing waters.
“It is a reminder that nature is more powerful than man and we cannot do anything, only wait,” said Gabriel Riboulet, a 26-year-old entrepreneur, as he took in the scene.
A small number of basement flats in the capital were flooded on Friday and a campsite in the Bois de Boulogne forest in the west of the capital was cleared but there was no order yet for any Parisians to evacuate.