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After terrorist attacks and widespread strikes, large parts of the country now face severe flooding nine days before the start of the Euro 2016 football championship, The Independent writes.

Although the River Seine has reached the top of the arches of its bridges and some of the Paris quays have been closed, experts say there is no immediate threat to the French capital.
Large areas of north central France, within the catchment area of the River Seine, are already severely flooded after the wettest May since the 1880s.

The last happened in January 1910 and continued for 45 days. In its long history, the city has been flooded by the Seine on average once a century.

The height of the flood in 1910 was measured at 8.62 metres at the Pont d’Austerlitz in eastern Paris. Its level at the same spot on Tuesday was 3.82 metres.

Experts predict that as the flood water arrives from the south, the Seine could reach 5.2 metres by Friday of this week.

“It would need a very rainy month of June before the situation became really worrying,” Vazken Andreassian, a hydrologist with France’s institute for environmental an agricultural research, said today.
The latest weather forecasts suggest that a spell of drier weather should begin this weekend.