PARIS - Northwestern France and Paris remained on alert at the weekend after weeks of rainfall triggered flooding that left three dead and hundreds homeless, and sparked a bitter debate about inadequate flood defences.
Five main rivers - the Seine, which empties into the English Channel; the Moselle andRhine in the east; and the Saone and Rhone in the southeast - were running extremely high.
The Seine had the look of the Mississippi as its chocolate-brown water scudded halfway up a guardsman statue on the Pont de Alma bridge by the Eiffel Tower.
The bateaux-mouche sightseeing boats remained huddled together at their mooring chains, unable to get under the Paris bridges.
Express roads on either side of the river were barricaded off as waves lapped at the tarmac. On the city's western fringes, in the department (county) of the Yvelines, several islands were under water, forcing residents' evacuation.
But the worst-hit was Normandy, where about a hundred villages were flooded and nearly 40,000 people were without drinking water. Inhabitants of Grainville-la-Teinturiere woke to find their kitchens and living rooms flooded and their cars washed away after the Durdent River burst its banks.
Water levels are slowly going down but dozens of major roads remained blocked by floodwater or collapsed embankments.
The floods come only 16 months after inundations in the southwest that killed 29 people and inflicted over $800 million damage.
France spends $350 millon a year on flood defences, but the average annual cost of floods is three times as much, the National Audit Office said last year.
