While the bodies of the father and one of the couple’s two children were discovered on Monday and Tuesday, the mother and grandmother of the victims expressed their anger on March 12.
The emotion is palpable in Gard. This Tuesday, March 12, the body of a little girl was discovered in the waters of the Gardon at midday. The victim corresponds to the 4-year-old girl who had been missing since Sunday, after her family’s car was trapped by the floods that occurred in the department during the passage of storm Monica. The family, made up of two parents and two children, was returning from dinner at their grandmother’s when their vehicle found itself trapped by water as it crossed a submersible bridge. Only the mother was able to be rescued when emergency services arrived on site.
This Tuesday, the mother of the father, and therefore grandmother of the children, Christiane, spoke at length to BFMTV. Saying she was optimistic about the fate of her 13-year-old grandson, still wanted, the grandmother also expressed her anger. According to her, her daughter-in-law, who was driving at the time of the incident, is not a reckless person. Furthermore, and still according to her, the mother would never have used the bridge if the barrier had been correctly closed. “This is not true,” she again assured our colleagues, returning to the information according to which the bridge was closed at 11 p.m. And added: “It was only closed at a quarter to midnight! My son would never have taken this bridge with his two children on board and his partner, if it had been closed.” The grandmother has already assured BFMTV that she intends to go all the way, if ever it is necessary to file a complaint, particularly against the State.
While the two children remained untraceable this Tuesday morning, the search to try to find them resumed for the third day, around 8 a.m., after stopping operations overnight. The searches took place along the Gardon, downstream of Dions, a village of 500 inhabitants north of Nîmes, near where the car sheltering the children was swept away by the waters. “The vehicle of the missing was found downstream of the submersible bridge” on Sunday, the prefect of Gard sur X revealed on Monday.
This Tuesday afternoon, in a press release, the public prosecutor confirmed that the body discovered Monday was indeed that of the father of the two children. On Monday, the mother of the missing 41-year-old man, distraught, explained to Parisian having welcomed the family for dinner on Saturday: “When they left, around 11 p.m., it was raining hard, but there was nothing alarming either. It was my daughter-in-law who took the wheel, she don’t drink a drop of alcohol and never be reckless.”
The search had a better chance of succeeding this Tuesday, according to the spokesperson for the Gard firefighters, Michel Cherbetian, contacted by AFP. He explained that the water level had fallen again, returning the Gardon to a usual level and allowing “refinement of searches”, particularly in areas which remained inaccessible or submerged on Monday. During floods, missing people can be carried by rivers several tens of kilometers and be found further away, the firefighter said. The man did not rule out the possibility that the two children would not be found.