A tornado swept through a village in southwestern France last night, destroying homes and injuring 39 people, authorities said, describing it as a rare and traumatic event.
Two of the injured are in a critical condition and around 300 houses in the village of Pomas have been damaged, officials said.
Everyone in the village has been evacuated while authorities verify if homes are still safe to live in, they added.
French authorities had issued an orange alert for storms across large portions of the southwest, with numerous areas suffering power outages and transport disruptions.
In the Aude department, officials cancelled the third stage of the Vuelta a Espana cycling race, which was being held in the area, when a hailstorm forced riders to seek shelter.
The tornado hit hardest in Pomas, a village with a population of 1,000, 15km south of Carcassonne, damaging an estimated 300 homes and, in some cases, ripping their roofs off.
Fifteen of the injured were taken to hospital, including a pregnant woman who was injured when her house collapsed.
The Tornado swirling in the village of Verzeille
“It felt as though death itself was falling upon us,” a Pomas resident told BFM TV.
Speaking in front of her house, now flattened by the tornado, she said this morning that the car her family piled into was shaken by the tornado before they managed to speed up and escape.
“We fled, it was survival instinct,” she said, as people helped the family of four sort through the ruins to see what could be salvaged.
More than 120 emergency workers were deployed to the scene, local authorities said.
The national weather service, Meteo-France, said winds had reached up to 117 km/h in the nearby village of Arquettes-en-Val.
France experiences several dozen tornadoes per year on average
The village of Pomas was evacuated while safety assessments were carried out
Social media footage verified by Reuters also showed the tornado swirling above the nearby village of Verzeille in Aude.
Many of the homes caught up in its path had their windows smashed.
The tornado struck as this summer’s intense heatwave gave way this week to thunderstorms in many areas of southern France.
This morning 1,400 households in the area were still without electricity, the local prefecture said.
“This is an exceptional event, and it is deeply traumaticfor all the residents,” senior official Marie-Helene Bouissac told reporters.
Storms across southern France caused chaos on the local transportation network, delaying trains, forcing road closures and causing delays and cancellations at airports in Bordeaux, Marseille, Nice, Toulouse and even Paris to the north, Transport Minister Philippe Tabarot said.