“It’s okay, I only have a spilled pot. This grave there was less lucky.” The day after storm Ciaran which hit the west of the country, Jaqueline came to the Dinan cemetery (Côtes-d’Armor), to see the damage to her husband’s grave and to help pick up the pots on neighboring graves. Winds blew at 140 km/h in the department this Wednesday evening, causing a lot of damage.
As tradition dictates, many flowers were placed in the cemetery for All Saints’ Day. Many could not withstand the wind. “We have a few pots that have blown away with the wind. Well, I don’t know if they flew, but they moved a lot,” confides Jean-Jacques Saintilan, the cemetery manager during his rounds in the alleys. “I imagine we must have a few hundred like that in the cemetery.”
To the west of the cemetery, town hall officials are working to collect the few branches that were torn by the wind from the trees bordering the cemetery. “We have a fringe of trees in this part of the cemetery and in which there was a lot of fall this morning. We came to check that everything is okay, to see if there are things to evacuate, which is the case but to a lesser extent. We expected worse,” explains Ophélie Guillemard, responsible for green spaces at the Dinan town hall. She and her colleague will still leave with the van full of branches.
Visitors are gradually collecting the pots and commemorative plaques, hoping to restore the cemetery to its serenity before the next gust of wind, expected this weekend.
2023-11-02 20:03:51
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