“The neighbor saw a big flash, he thought it was a firework being set off. In fact, it was the house next door that was catching fire. It was most likely an electrical surge caused by the storm: a cable caught fire after a lightning strike. The residents have been relocated by the family,” said firefighter Pascal Bouissou, who was in charge of the rescue operations on Monday evening.
The gendarmerie, the mayor of Agnos, EDF and Enedis were on the scene. Enedis agents equipped the damaged home with a generator, given that one of the residents uses a respirator daily. According to the firefighters, the fire started from the roof. They managed to extinguish the fire around 10 p.m.
Hospital: work behind schedule?
Before that, they had been called for a flood at the Oloron Hospital Center. Another one, some say. “Every time there is a big storm, it’s the same thing. There is work that should have been done and wasn’t,” says a hospital source.
Indeed, just one year ago, on September 11, 2023, the Oloron hospital had already suffered a major flood after a major storm that was accompanied by even heavier rain than on Monday, September 2: many areas of the hospital had been flooded, including the morgue. At the time, the on-call administrator mentioned a problem with the waterproofing of a roof – which had to be fixed as soon as possible, he promised – and with the evacuation grids. Last night, it was the morgue again that was flooded.
At the same time, firefighters also had to intervene in the Lanneretonne area, for the flooding of the Charont printing works, victim of a water leak.
Two explosions
Finally, at the time we joined the firefighters, around 11:15 p.m., they were fighting the last embers of a van that had caught fire, below the rue de Rocgrand, on the banks of the Gave d’Aspe, still in Oloron.
Alexandra, a local resident, explained that she heard an explosion around 10:30 p.m. “I looked out the window and saw that it was burning, with flames going very high. I called the firefighters right away. When I went downstairs to wait for them, I saw a second explosion with a white light. At the time, it was weird…”, she said.
Fear of arriving too late
While the rain was still pouring down, Alexandra stayed underneath, waiting for the firefighters to finish their work, “so as not to worry anymore.” Her biggest fear at that moment was imagining that someone was in the truck when it exploded. “That would mean I arrived too late…”
