A difficult weekend for many in the Cher Valley

The Loire Valley flooding crisis is far from over. I didn't go out yesterday — we are all being asked to stay home if we can. The photos here are some more that I took Thursday afternoon.

The Cher at Saint-Aignan looks more like a lake than a river right now.

My planned trip to Paris by train tomorrow has had to be canceled. With the current strikes affecting train schedules and the flooding in areas from here all the way to Paris, it wouldn't be wise to try to make the trip. It talked to CHM about it on the phone yesterday, and he thought it better to postpone for now.

The Sur le Pont restaurant's kitchen and outdoor seating area are at river level and are obviously flooded.

Evidently, flooding along the Cher River, from east of Saint-Aignan all the way to Tours, 40 miles west, will continue all through the weekend. Below is a translation of an article I read in the regional newspaper, La Nouvelle République, this morning.

These houses at the foot of the château in Saint-Aignan are protected from rising waters by a stone wall.

In the Cher Valley, the biggest problems are yet to come. The river crested at Vierzon [35 miles east of Saint-Aignan] on Friday afternoon. It will take another 24 hours for the crest to reach Montrichard [10 miles west of Saint-Aignan], and 48 hours for it to travel from Vierzon to Tours [130 kilometers, or 80 miles, in all].

It probably wasn't a great idea to build a house with a basement-level garage like this.

Conditions will continue to deteriorate all along the river and will not soon improve because the crest is a kind of "plateau" and the water level will stay high for two or three more days. "In the Cher Valley, conditions won't get back to normal before Tuesday," warn authorities in Blois, the administrative capital of the Loir-et-Cher "department" [county]. People are being asked to limit their travels to a strict minimum, to respect all warnings, and to exercise great care.

The east-west A85 autoroute crosses the Cher valley on a long viaduct. Normally these are fields, not water.

The article also says that the A10 autoroute remains closed to traffic between Orléans and Paris, but is open from Orléans to Blois and on to Tours, apparently. Here's a link to the full article about the situation, in French.

Here's one of the lock-keeper's houses on the Cher across from the village of Mareuil. It and the fields on both sides of the river are flooded.

And here's a link to an accompanying article about the disastrous effects the flooding is having on on agriculture in the area. Many farm animals have drowned, spring crops have been destroyed, and seeds sown for the summer and fall harvests have been washed away all along the Cher river valley.

This looks like a lake but it's actually a field along the river that's planted in corn in summertime.

I do have to go out this morning. I'm going to SuperU, which like our house is up on high ground, but getting there means driving down into the river valley. If the gravel road through the vineyard hadn't been so damaged by the heavy rains, with gullies and ruts everywhere, I could go that way, but today I don't want to risk it.