Video captures terrifying moment elderly couple swept up in waves
Horrifying footage has captured the moment an elderly couple was swept out to sea by violent waves at a beach in France.
They are battered back and forth by the force of the waves, as a man trying to rescue them also gets pulled into the terrifying tumult.
The video was taken on Monday close to 5pm on Porsguen beach in Brittany, where the coast was being pounded by a storm.
The man filming was not with the couple but with Olivier Lou, a Parisian tourist, who was walking back from the beach, past the elderly couple, when a large wave came behind him.
When his friend, a disabled man who is unable to intervene, shouts a warning to him, Mr Lou runs to escape the pull of the wave.
But the elderly couple is not so lucky.
The 75-year-old man loses his footing and is pulled out to sea with his wife running after him, screaming.
Mr Lou runs to help but is forced to stand back as another wave plunges down onto the couple, pulling them both out.
When Mr Lou finally reaches them and tries to pull them out, all three are swept up in the crash of a wave that blasts them towards the beach.
Filming ends there but the Daily Mail reports a 42-year-old passerby saw the events and jumped in to help.
Eric Roudaut, a local mechanic, helped Mr Lou pull the elderly man to safety but his 76-year-old wife was hauled back by more waves.
'She was pulled out to sea several times, floating back with the waves each time, until there was an enormous wave which took us back, throwing us all the way back to the dunes,' Mr Roudaut told France 2.
When he eventually got her out, after what Mr Roudaut estimates was about ten minutes in the water, the woman was unconscious.
A medical team arrived by helicopter and revived her, before she and her husband were taken to a nearby hospital.
Local media reported their injuries were not life threatening.
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