A rare tornado tore through the southwestern French village of Pomas overnight, destroying homes and injuring 39 people in what authorities described as a deeply traumatic event.
Two people suffered critical injuries, while about 300 houses were damaged, officials said.
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The entire village was evacuated as emergency teams assessed whether the damaged properties remained safe to occupy, authorities added.
France’s weather service had issued an orange storm alert across much of the southwest, where widespread power cuts and disruption to transport were also reported.
Pomas, home to about 1,000 people, lies 15km south of Carcassonne and bore the brunt of the tornado. An estimated 300 homes were damaged, with roofs torn away from some properties.
Fifteen injured people were taken to hospital, including a pregnant woman hurt when her house collapsed.
The tornado swirling in the village of Verzeille
“It felt as though death itself was falling upon us,” a Pomas resident told BFM TV.
Standing outside the home that had been flattened, she said on Wednesday morning that the car carrying her family was rocked by the tornado before they managed to accelerate away.
“We fled, it was survival instinct,” she said, while people helped the family of four search the wreckage for anything that could be recovered.
More than 120 emergency workers were sent to the scene, local authorities said.
Meteo-France, the national weather service, recorded winds of up to 117 km/h in the nearby village of Arquettes-en-Val.
France experiences several dozen tornadoes per year on average
The village of Pomas was evacuated while safety assessments were carried out
Social media footage verified by Reuters also captured the tornado spiralling above Verzeille, another village in the Aude department.
Numerous homes along its path had shattered windows, adding to the scale of the damage.
The tornado arrived as an intense summer heatwave began to break, with thunderstorms developing across large parts of southern France this week.
About 1,400 households in the area remained without electricity on Wednesday morning, the local prefecture said.
“This is an exceptional event, and it is deeply traumatic for all the residents,” senior official Marie-Helene Bouissac told reporters.
Storms across southern France also disrupted the transport network, delaying trains, closing roads and causing delays and cancellations at airports in Bordeaux, Marseille, Nice, Toulouse and Paris farther north, Transport Minister Philippe Tabarot said.
