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Alerts lifted after hailstorms lash France

Meteorologists finally lifted severe weather alerts on Tuesday after 48 hours in which intense rain and hailstorms pounded France. While the nasty weather has passed, it left behind a fair amount of destruction. See some of the dramatic images and videos here.

Published: 10 June 2014 10:59 CEST
Alerts lifted after hailstorms lash France
Hail stones the size of tennis balls left residents in France counting the cost of damage this weekend. Photo: Screengrab BFMTV

Residents in towns around France were fixing broken windows, damaged roofs and cleaning up from flooding after a brutal string of late spring storms blasted across the country this weekend.

It was only at 4am on Tuesday that France’s weather service Météo France lifted the orange alert– the second-highest warning — after the last of the storms had passed through.

While no one lost their lives, tennis-ball sized hail was reported around the country, including in the Ile-de-France area around Paris. In the southern Paris suburb of Mormant a secondary school was closed after its roof was damaged by hail, which also caused the roof of a house to collapse in the town.

"Between 12:30am and 12:45am, it sounded like someone was shooting our house with artillery. Hail the size of tennis balls was falling, breaking the windscreen of our car and tearing through the garden furniture,” said a storm victim who gave her name only as Valérie, according to French Daily Le Parisien.

The storms also saw some 23,900 lightning strikes across France and wind gusts of up to 130 km per hour in some places. Incredibly the lightning and high wind didn’t seriously injure anyone.

However for some parts of France the nasty weather isn’t completely finished. In the east of France from Lorraine to the Alps, more storms are on the way. The storms are expected to drop more heavy rain and hail.

These videos below from BFMTV show the force of the hailstorms that battered huge swathes of the country.

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