One orange left, and it is a river

At 03:04 Paris time on Wednesday, Météo-France listed no département in red¹. One was in orange: Gard, for floods¹. Twenty-six were in yellow¹.

From sky to river. The yellow list shows how the episode has changed shape. Haute-Corse and Corse-du-Sud are now yellow for wind, rain, storms and floods¹. Ardèche, Bouches-du-Rhône, Drôme, Hérault, Var and Vaucluse are yellow for floods only¹. That is the normal sequence after a Mediterranean downpour: the rain warning comes down first, the river warning stays up, because water takes days to drain through a catchment.

A second weather. On the Atlantic and Channel side, a different system has put the coast from Finistère to Nord in yellow for wind, with storms flagged in Calvados, Manche, Seine-Maritime, Charente-Maritime, Gironde, Landes and Vendée¹.

The context that makes floods odd. This rain fell on a dry country. Copernicus reports that September 2026 was France’s third-driest since 1958, with a national rainfall deficit of about 70%, and that record-low September flows were measured on sections of the Garonne-Dordogne, among other rivers². Dry, hard ground sheds heavy rain quickly. A drought and a flood warning in the same autumn are not a contradiction; they are the same soil.

The constructive reading. The warning system did its job in both directions. It went up in time, and it is coming down step by step as the measurements allow. For anyone in Gard, the orange is about rivers and low roads, not the sky.