Snow, Rain Cut Power, Force Evacuations in Europe : Weather: Storm in France dumps more than average month’s worth of rain in a day; hundreds flee. A car is washed away with a child trapped inside.

A winter storm that dumped more than an average month’s worth of rain in a day forced hundreds of French to evacuate their homes Friday and washed away a car with a child trapped inside.

Flooding also hit German towns and cities along the Mosel and Rhine rivers again, erasing cleanup work that had just been finished after Christmas floods subsided.

At least eight people have died in two weeks of flooding across France, which has been hit with three times the normal rainfall in December. Four more have been killed in weather-related ski accidents.

The storms also caused flooding in Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Rising rivers put many towns on alert in southern France, including areas hard-hit by floods in 1992. The Camargue region of the Rhone River delta could face the worst flooding in a century, officials said.

The storm that swept in Thursday from the Mediterranean dumped 7.8 inches of rain in 24 hours in some areas, more than three times the monthly average, said Dominique Escale of Meteo France, the national weather forecasting agency.

Up to 6.5 feet of snow fell in the Alps, raising the risk of avalanches, she said. The snow caused the closure of the Mont Blanc tunnel linking France and Italy, the regional traffic center in Lyon reported.

Near Carpentras, 330 miles southeast of Paris, a raging river carried away a car with a 12-year-old boy inside. The mother, who was driving him to school, escaped, officials said. Divers launched a search for the boy.

About 300 people were evacuated along the Durance River south of Carpentras and nearby Avignon, disaster officials said.

At least 700 firefighters were preparing for rescue operations in the Vaucluse region, where the Ouveze River had risen over its banks in Vaison-la-Romaine and other towns.

Most of the 38 people who died in the September, 1992, floods were in Vaison-la-Romaine.

Heavy snow caused a transformer to catch fire, cutting off power to 80,000 people in the Forez area, 280 miles southeast of Paris, Electricite de France said.

Another 80,000 homes in the Loire region in the west were without power. Broken power lines blocked highways and cut train services in eastern France, and avalanches closed highways in the south, officials said.

In Koblenz, Germany, where the Mosel empties into the Rhine, the German military was called in to help build sandbag walls and evacuate residents to a military barracks.

Many buildings hit with the new floodwaters had just been cleaned up and shop owners and residents were preparing to move back in. Other cities and towns along the Rhine and Mosel rivers were also flooded a second time.

Barge traffic on the Rhine was stopped.