FLASH floods in southwestern France have killed an elderly woman as the inundated grotto at the Roman Catholic pilgrimage site of Lourdes remains closed for a second day.
The woman in her 70s was washed away overnight by the floodwaters after getting out of her submerged car at Saint Beat near Lourdes, the local prefecture said in a statement.
Her husband was rescued by firefighters.
About 2000 people in the region were evacuated, some of them by helicopter. A bridge at Saint-Laurent-de-Neste was washed away by a tributary of the Garonne river.
The shrine at Lourdes, where the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared to a peasant girl in 1858 and whose water many believe has curative powers, remained closed on Wednesday.
Tourists in the town were relocated from hotels bordering the Gave de Pau to an area on higher ground.
On Tuesday afternoon, there was already 1.40 metres of water in the Lourdes cave and the Gave de Pau river nearby was 3.50 metres above its normal level.
The French interior and ecology ministers were due to visit Lourdes later on Wednesday to assess the damage in the area, home to 22 shrines.
In 2012, the Lourdes shrines were closed after flash floods that caused hundreds of thousands of euros in damage.
But rivers in the region were now gradually returning to their normal levels.
"The waters are abating. We have seen a steady decrease through the night," an official from the Haute-Pyrenees region told AFP.
AFP je
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