Louvre art evacuated to escape rising Seine
Water levels in the Seine are at their highest level since 1910
Staff at the Louvre museum in Paris scrambled to evacuate 150,000 objects from the museum’s priceless collection on Friday as water levels in the Seine river were expected to reach their highest point since 1910.
The evacuation from the world-famous gallery’s store rooms, where the majority of the Louvre’s collection is kept, took place as city authorities battled against the highest water levels in living memory.
Marion Benaiteau, Louvre press officer, said it was the first such evacuation since the museum’s 1989 makeover, when it acquired its glass pyramid.
“It’s a first,” she told the FT. The Louvre’s doors were closed to the public on Friday, as were those of the Musée d’Orsay on the left bank of the river.
After days of intense rain, the interior ministry said that 20,000 citizens had been evacuated from their homes across France as a result of the harsh and unusual weather.
François Hollande, France’s Socialist president, declared a “natural catastrophe”.
The emergency measures in Paris, just days before the country prepares to host the Euro 2016 football tournament, came as Europe endured a week of heavy rains.
In Germany the worst damage was in Bavaria, where houses and roads have been wrecked, and at least seven people have died, according to local media reports.
Angela Merkel, the chancellor, expressed her condolences for the victims. “We mourn those for whom help came too late,” she said on Thursday, adding that she was following the situation closely.
In the Bavarian town of Simbach am Inn, houses were flooded and roads were damaged after local rivers burst their banks, while in nearby Triftern, about 30 children had to sleep in their school’s sport hall on Wednesday night after bridges became impassable.
Siegfried Schmied, managing director at the town hall in Triftern, said that the clean-up exercise was now in full swing and that the weather had improved, although the forecast for the weekend was uncertain.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, the river Issel rose from its normal depth of half a metre to over 2m on Thursday. Local officials said on Friday morning that water levels were falling. However, Germany’s weather service has warned of further rains on Friday night.
The GDV trade body for Germany’s insurance industry said that the insured losses caused by storm Elvira, which caused localised flooding in Baden-Württemberg last weekend, would come to about €450m. However, it added that this did not include the subsequent damage in Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia.
In the French capital, traffic was thrown into chaos as authorities closed inundated tunnels and the road running along the side of the river. The RER C, one of the rapid transit lines serving Paris was closed and authorities opened two gymnasiums to shelter the city’s homeless from the rains.
The tips of the Seine’s two main islands in central Paris, the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis, traditional picnic spots for tourists during the summer months, were under water on Friday as the river’s swirling brown water partially covered benches and trees.
River traffic, including the city’s famous bateaux mouches open-air tourist boats, was suspended as water levels filled the normally spacious arches of the city’s numerous bridges.
Anne Hidalgo, Paris mayor, said that the river levels were not a threat to the population but conceded that the state of alert remained “very very high”.
By Friday evening, the water in the Seine was expected to reach 6.5m, one of the highest readings since the great Paris flood of 1910.
In March, the country’s Urban Planning Institute (IAU) carried out “Operation Sequena”, a large-scale simulation to allow emergency services to rehearse their response to a repeat of the city’s 1910 flood, in which the capital was inundated for more than a month. The 11-day exercise involved hundreds of personnel from the police and emergency services.
Ms Hidalgo told journalists that water levels were expected to reach their maximum point Friday, after which they would begin to subside. But she added: “What we expect is that the decrease is going to be very slow and very long.”
www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7c81e1c8-2987-11e6-8ba3-cdd781d02d89.html#axzz4AXj1VyQT
