The weather!

About 31 degrees here this afternoon, with intense sunshine and very humid again. Tonight it’s cooling nicely, probably mid 20s right now. Feeling like a normal mid August evening. :slightly_smiling_face:

Yes, I noted that in the early reports, although they’re not necessarily all recent builds. The school was built in 1955 and there must have been a decent population to warrant that.

Reports targeting damage to Housing is fair enough since that involved People. thankfully no deaths.
and the Maire told reporters about the damage to the Mairie, the school and the entire village.

Here’s an extract from TF1 which clearly says that old and new.. no matter.. the tornado touched everything..

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Post war builds were often pretty cheap and not high spec.

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Often??? In which country???

Let’s be fair, if the Chateau and the Church (amongst other “old” buildings) can be damaged… then anything more modern is likely to have been damaged too…

Actually in many countries. Wars tend to be expensive and cause destruction that needs repair quickly to get the country back on its feet.

One of my favorite buildings, the Eglise Notre-Dame at Royan is a cheap concrete construction but it was considered important to build a new church post-war so they moved quickly. Sadly it needs massive restoration now.

Old buildings by the nature of their construction are often more easily repairable than more modern ones where replacement is more likely.

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Must confess, local “listed buildings” are very tightly supervised when it comes to repair/rebuild.

Whatever, it will be interesting to see how Pomas attacks the mammoth task ahead.

OK - so we survived last night’s forecasted amount of rain (see posting 2560). That was because we only had 14.00mm! How on earth can those weather men get it so wrong.

We’ve had the PC off most of the day because again, heavy storms were forecast and from bitter experience, we don’t want the PC to get zapped (again). So what did we get. Sod all!

We’re supposed to be getting heavy rain at around 2100hrs but we’ll see.

Anyway however much rain we do get, it’s good for our well water level. We were down to the last 0.50metres of water. Never been that low before so we’ll at least survive another season of well water usage. :grinning_face:

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We had thunder and torrential rain here for about 20min at 2 this afternoon, after a warm & humid start. Now overcast but dry.

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Not sure why you need to confess :joy:, I’m sure you don’t vandalise old buildings. By easily repairable I meant that it is usually possible, not that it was necessarily a bodge job.

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:rofl: OK.. perhaps I should have said… I disagree.. or I have found it/things to be different…

I’ve heard “must confess” come before a complete annihilation of whatever the previous speaker has said… guess I’ve borrowed it.. although I was only intending to put across what I know happens locally. :rofl:

and re old historic buildings in general … not always easy to find those folk suitably qualified… and then one has to find matching/suitable raw materials… I reckon much easier with modern buildings needing attention.

We can agree to disagree… :wink:

‘Must confess’ probably sounds better than ‘with respect’ = I’m going to be rude to you or ‘with great respect’ = I’m going to be very rude to you. :slight_smile:

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It’s amazing isn’t it how some small pockets of France can be so completely and utterly different from everywhere else…!

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That’s surely what makes France such a fun place. :+1:

My wife was commenting earlier this evening that we have never stayed on the house without there being at least 1 thunderstorm, even if we’ve only been here a week. So far there have been at least 2 that I’ve noticed this week alone.

Absolutely, especially as last 15 years of my career were in construction - modern and historic.

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sounds fabulous..
I’ve only been a “fly on the wall” during visits to and by Bat de France etc.. prior and during some renovations-rebuilds, fascinating to a newbie.
Later watching the artisans at work.. that was really something.

Unprecedented is the word. There have been storms and storms over more than 30 years here, but nothing like this, a couple of evenings ago. The thunder is one long constant rumbling roar in the southern sky towards the Bordeaux area, maybe more than a 100kms away. I was on its outer rim, which was getting closer, and towards the end of the video I had to slam the windows shut to escape. About 15 minutes later – it was gone!

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I saw distant huge almost constant lightning last night, illuminating the clouds, immense and well to the east of chez moi, so I imagine really impressive if you were just underneath. I made a video but binned it as it was rubbish.

Agreed, extraordinary. But somehow not frightening.

I remember when small, my brother and I on either side of my mother, sitting on the sofa in the lounge, with the dog at our feet, all huddled together, with a thunderstorm crashing over our heads. My poor mother was as afraid of thunderstorms as we were, putting on a brave face for the sake of her children.

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Yes, I have the same sort of memories of storms when I was a child with my sister, brother and parents. And our late departed Annie (my avatar) absolutely hated thunder. She would move anything and everything in the kitchen to get under the sink and hide and she would howl like a banshee too.

We had thunder yesterday evening and like @Bonzocat’s video, it just went on for ages and ages. But we didn’t have any powercuts yesterday which was good news. Thank goodness the storms have gone away. We’re pleased that this rain has increased our well water level. We’ve now got 2.50 metres in the well !

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