POMAS: THE SKY CAME CRASHING DOWN ON THEM | M6 | 66 minutes

On Monday, August 24, at 5:20 p.m., a tornado tore through the village of Pomas in the Aude region. A cataclysmic onslaught that lasted less than five minutes. And yet the damage is considerable: three quarters of the homes were affected.
A war zone. The apocalypse. For Jérôme, an employee of Pomas’s technical services department who filmed the tornado live on his mobile phone, even those words are not strong enough to describe the scar that cut right across the village.
Some, like Dimitri, his wife and their two children, aged 5 and 9, have lost everything. Their home has been reduced to four walls; everything else was blown away. Furniture, keepsakes, cars beyond repair, the children’s toys…
Now they must retrieve whatever belongings they can, contact their insurance company and, above all, call family and friends to find a roof over their heads for the next few days, just days before the start of the school year, which may not go ahead after all.
The school was also damaged. The old château, dating back 1,000 years, could not withstand winds of more than 200 km/h either.
For Pomas’s 1,017 residents, there is no time to lose. They must save whatever can still be salvaged. The community is rallying together.
And they must remain on alert: severe thunderstorms are expected between now and Friday.