Rain brings floods to northern France

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AFP

Image caption

Firefighters took to a dinghy in Bruay-la-Buissiere, near Lens

Parts of northern France have woken to flooding after sustained heavy rain, which shut down the French Open tennis tournament on Monday.

The national weather service declared a red alert in the Loiret Department and orange alerts in regions nearby as the River Loing burst its banks.

Further north, the Pas de Calais Department was also on alert.

A child of three drowned in the Yonne Department on Sunday while lightning injured 11 people in Paris on Saturday.

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Media captionVirgile Resende: “This group of people decided to group under a tree to get to safety and it was a bad choice for them”

Most of those injured by the lightning bolt in a city park were children.

The child who died on Sunday was found in the basement of their family home in the village of Saint-Martin-d’Ordon.

It appears that the child slipped and fell, French media say.

One of the towns particularly affected by the flooding on Tuesday was Bruay-la-Buissiere, near Lens, where firefighters patrolled the streets on a dinghy.

Emergency services were called out 4,500 times across the country between Monday evening and Tuesday morning as “numerous” roads flooded and hundreds of evacuations were carried out, AFP news agency reports.

Monday’s washout at the French Open was the first time in 16 years a whole day’s play had been cancelled but tournament director Guy Forget remained confident the tournament would finish on schedule on Sunday.

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Rain brings floods to northern France
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