The Seine river water levels stopped mounting Saturday (June 4) and began receding slightly, relieving Parisians who were worried by floodwaters that burst the river’s banks and flooded some apartment buildings’ basements.
After reaching a peak height of 6.1 meters (20 feet) at 2 a.m. (0000 GMT) overnight, according to French flood monitoring agency Vigicrues, the river slowly began receding and was at 6.04 meters (19.8 feet) at 10 a.m. (0800 GMT).
Marie-France, who was walking along the river Saturday morning with a baguette, said she was breathing easy now the water had stopped rising.
“There are a lot of people whose feet got wet. Here, if the Seine continues to rise, it would be the Parisians who would be in the water. So it’s good that it’s stabilized and that the waters will begin to recede,” she said.
Nicole Morel, who lives on the ninth floor of an apartment building on the banks of the Seine, said the first floor of her building was evacuated after taking on water.
She said she took in a neighbor who was living in the ground floor.
“I think it (flooding) will now stop. But in all cases, I think that in France there are situations more dire than ours. But it’s true that because our building is the closest to the Seine River, everyone is focused on us. Yesterday, I received text messages, ‘we saw your building watchman, we saw your building.’ But hey, everything is fine here,” Morel said.
The rain-swollen Seine hit its highest level in 30 years, submerging riverside roads, swamping small businesses on quaysides and forcing the closure of an underground commuter line.
The worst affected areas lay just to the south of the capital.
Even as the Seine crested higher, it remained well below the record high of 8.6 meters (28.2 feet) reached in 1910, when thousands of Parisians had to flee inundated low-lying areas of the city.
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Source: bdnews24
