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Thousands caught in 600km traffic jams as French head for summer holidays

Thousands of motorists are caught in 600km of traffic jams on France’s roads on Saturday as holiday-makers head for south and others headed home. A police officer was killed and another seriously injured in a road accident that was unlikely to be the day’s last.

The A25 motorway in northern France
The A25 motorway in northern France Floflo62/Wikimedia Commons
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There were already 20km of traffic jams in the Ile de France region around Paris and 76km in the rest of the country by 9.00am and the tailbacks were set to get worse, according to the Bison Futé traffic monitor.

By midday that had lengthened to 600km.

Bison Futé advised drivers to stay off the roads between Paris and Lyon from 7.00am and 8.00pm and declared a red alert heading south and an orange alert heading north for the whole day.

The worst traffic jams were on the A7 motorway between Lyon and Marseille where there were 91km of tailbacks by midday, with other hot spots on route for the Alps ski resorts and on the A10 near Tours.

By midday tailbacks were reported in Brittany, in the west between Paris and La Rochelle, near Bordeaux and near the Spanish border.

A CRS police officer was killed and one of his colleagues hospitalised when a lorry ran them over at the scene of an earlier accident in the Paris region.

Another fatal accident took place at Arzens, south-west France, when a lorry collided with two cars.

Temperatures in the upper 20°Cs were forecast with storms in Franche Comté, Burgundy, the Rhone Valley and around Nice.
 

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