According to Keraunos, the French observatory of tornadoes and violent thunderstorms, the storm episode which swept metropolitan France on Wednesday June 25, 2025, for a assessment of at least two dead and seventeen injured, was marked by an electrical activity “Remarkable by its extent” : Thus, nearly 17,000 lightning impacts hit the ground.
The most powerful of them was recorded in Deux-Sèvres, at very exactly 7:06 p.m. north of the Peyratte: its intensity was 517 kilos-ammperes. Also a fact ” outstanding “, Since it turns out “Twenty times higher than average” of the day.
“I heard the walls vibrate”
“It happens quite rarely, Analysis of Emmanuel Wesolek, the president of Keraunos. There is one or two per month of this intensity on hundreds of thousands of lightning impacts. It is not historical, but it is not common either. »» Lightning would have shot down at the edge of a grove, perhaps in a field or on a tree, at least in a rural area and not on a home.
The Deux-Sèvres were not one of the nearly sixty departments to have been placed in orange vigilance with thunderstorms: staying on yellow alert, they seem to have been, on the whole, spared by bad weather. “Some thunderstorms broke out west of Poitiers, PRECISE Emmanuel Wesolk. But it is not necessarily under the most violent storms that there are the biggest lightning falls. It depends on the vertical configuration of the cloud. »»
Departure of fire on a post
In this specific case, informs the Niortais meteorologist Emmanuel Moreau, a stormy corridor crossed the Deux-Sèvres between 6:25 p.m. and 7:43 p.m., from Saint-Maixent-l’École to Thouarsais, before going back to Anjou. At the town hall of La Peyratte, the secretary immediately made the connection, she who lives in Gourgé, about ten kilometers: “There was a huge black cloud. It trembled, I heard the walls vibrate, so much that I thought that a plane had crashed! This is the first time that I have heard an impact of lightning like that. »»
It was also in Gourgé that the only intervention of firefighters was reported in connection with the bad weather in the department: a start of fire on a wooden telecom pole struck by lightning, precisely. He remained standing, dixit commander Nicolas Wasselin, at the departmental fire and rescue service. Return to the Peyratte, where electrical devices and internet boxes would have ” grid “, said the mayor, Jean-Claude Guérin. And circuit breakers would have jumped in the town with just under 1,200 inhabitants. Starting with that of the elected official.
