Deluge Floods Marseille Streets as Deadly Storm Lashes Provence

Torrential rain turned the streets of Marseille into rivers as a violent Mediterranean storm battered the Bouches-du-Rhône department, with water bursting up from a manhole in the city center.

X user SherifDeMars filmed the downpour on October 20, writing that it had been “the deluge since this morning” in the city. The footage shows pedestrians hunched under umbrellas and splashing across flooded pavements, wind whipping the trees, and water gushing out of a drain cover onto a square. It ends at a junction beneath the spires of a neo-Gothic church as rain keeps falling.

The storm dumped between 100 and 150 millimeters of rain between Vitrolles and Arles in 24 hours, with 235 millimeters recorded in Saint-Chamas, according to the Bouches-du-Rhône prefecture. Martigues passed 300 millimeters, about 40 percent of its average yearly rainfall. Firefighters carried out about 1,100 call-outs over two days, and several hundred people were evacuated.

By the evening of October 21, the prefecture said three people had died: a 75-year-old in Saint-Mitre-les-Remparts and two women, aged 86 and 26, who drowned in a cellar in Lançon-Provence. Train services between Miramas and Marseille via Rognac were suspended until October 27.