Not a sound on this Monday morning in the streets of this town of 350 inhabitants, apart from Enedis trucks and firefighters clearing. And a landscape of desolation.
The episode, extremely rare, took the village by surprise in the early evening, around 7:00 p.m. The Pas-de-Calais was however only classified as “yellow” vigilance for thunderstorms by Météo-France.
The prefecture evokes “strong gusts of wind of the tornado type”. But the inhabitants, they have no doubt: “It was not a mini-tornado, it was a tornado!”, They launch, annoyed.
“I saw it happen last night, it was huge. I said to myself, we’re not going to have a barrack anymore,” says a forty-year-old to his neighbor, with wet eyes.
“It lasted thirty seconds. When you see the disaster it looks like a bombardment. Incredible…”, says Christian Cabaret, 71, whose house was spared.
It is “sad”, he says, for those who have been affected: “It’s their savings that are going away, it’s their lives”.
– Skeletal frame –
“We have 150, 200 people to relocate for a very long period behind. Tonight we will succeed like yesterday in relocating with friends, relatives”, but then “we will have to find houses in the area”, details the mayor, Benoit-Vincent Caille.
“A state fund has been released for the victims”, but donations, in particular furniture, will be necessary, he says, as well as volunteers to clear the ground.
The damage is considerable.
In some houses, the gutted roofs reveal a skeletal frame. In others, the parts are completely bare. We can guess traces of everyday life: a coat hanger, a microwave, a fan…
The roof of the village church was partially torn off. Only the foundations of the adjacent house remain.
Rubble, pieces of concrete wall and branches litter the ground. Some windshields are shattered. An electric pole seems ready to topple over a house.
A large stuffed elephant lies in a garden, among the debris, under a completely torn roof from which hangs glass wool.
And the wind is still blowing, waving cables and bits of sheet metal.
A couple in their forties, looking exhausted, faces defeated, faces their dilapidated house, without roof or windows. Bags and suitcases in hand, they have “no time”, they say, to express themselves.
– “There is nothing left” –
Two friends accompany them, from surrounding villages, out of solidarity, to help them recover their belongings.
“The village was really devastated. Three quarters of the village” and in some streets “there is nothing left”, says Mabrouka Dhifallah, an LR regional councilor, present on the spot.
“Last night, a resident said to me: You know Madam, I lost in five seconds what I built in twenty years. You have to be there to understand the extent of the damage. It’s chaotic, It’s a disaster,” she added.
In the heart of the village, some have “lost everything”. “There is a young man who must be my age, around 20. His house is in ruins,” sighs a resident, Sébastien Gaudechon. At the end of the street, he is “doing well, with a few fewer tiles”.
At midday, the firefighters who had cut off access to certain streets to “secure” the premises, accompany the inhabitants to their homes, each in turn, to collect some belongings.
In the school next to the town hall, members of the Red Cross distribute food or comfort the shocked inhabitants, who are waiting to see a psychologist.
A septuagenarian sobs, supported by a member of the Samu: “Having worked all his life and seeing all that on the ground… I can’t.”
