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| Photo Credit: AP. |
CANTIANO, Italy (AP) — Flash floods swept through several towns Friday in hilly central Italy after hours of exceptionally heavy rain, leaving 10 people dead and at least four missing. Dozens of survivors scrambled onto rooftops or up into trees to await rescue.
Floods
invaded garages and basements and knocked down doors. In one town, the powerful
rush of water pushed a car onto a second-story balcony, while elsewhere parked
vehicles were crumpled on top of each other in the streets. Some farm fields
near the sea were meters (yards) under water.
“It wasn’t a
water bomb, it was a tsunami,” Riccardo Pasqualini, the mayor of Barbara, told
Italian state radio about the sudden downpour Thursday evening that devastated
his town in the Marche region near the Adriatic Sea.
He said the
overnight flooding left the town’s 1,300 residents without drinking water. A
mother and her young daughter were missing after trying to escape the floods,
Pasqualini told the Italian news agency ANSA. Elsewhere in town, a boy was
swept away from the arms of his mother, who was rescued.
Premier
Mario Draghi told a news conference in Rome that 10 people were dead and four
were missing in the flash floods. He thanked rescuers “for their
professionalism, dedication and courage.” Officials said some 50 people were
treated at hospitals for injuries.
Draghi, who is
serving in a caretaker role ahead of Italy’s Sept. 25 national election,
planned to tour some devastated towns later Friday and his government announced
5 million euros (dollars) in aid to the region.
“It was an
extreme event, more than an exceptional one,″ climatologist Massimiliano
Fazzini told Italian state TV. He said, based on his calculations, the amount
of rain that fell, concentrated over four hours that included an especially
heavy 15-minute period, was the most in hundreds of years.
In a space
of a few hours, the region was deluged with the amount of rainfall it usually
receives in six months, state TV said. A summer of virtually no rain meant
hillsides were unusually hard and dry, so the water ran faster down the slopes,
increasing its impact.
The fire
department tweeted that dozens of people trapped in cars or who had climbed up
to rooftops or trees to escape rising floodwaters had been rescued. Police in
the town of Sassoferrato, unable to reach a man trapped in a car, extending a
long tree branch to him and pulled him to safety.
Helicopter
crews rescued seven people in remote towns of the Apennine Mountains.
Hundreds of
firefighters struggled Friday to remove toppled tree trunks and branches amid
thick mud as they searched for people who could have been buried by debris.
They waded through waist-high water in flooded streets, while others paddled in
rubber dinghies to scoop up survivors.
In the town
of Ostra, a father and his adult son were found dead in their building’s flooded
garage where they had gone to try to get their car out, and another man who
tried to remove his motorcycle from a garage also perished, state TV said.
Elsewhere, a man was found dead in his car.
“As it (the
flood) played out, it was far, far worse than forecast,” said Civil Protection
chief Fabrizio Curcio. A bad weather watch had been issued on Thursday, but not
at the highest level.
Hundreds of
people fled or were evacuated from their homes until the premises could be
checked for safety and mountains of mud cleared away.
Some of the
worst flooding hit the town of Senigallia, where the River Misa overflowed its
banks. Hamlets in the hills near the Renaissance tourist town of Urbino were
also inundated when fast-moving rivers of water, mud and debris rushed through
the streets.
In the town
of Cantiano, people shoveled mud from stores and homes and an excavating
machine was deployed to clear the town square.
“I was lucky
because I live in a house up on a slope, so basically, the water didn’t reach
the point of covering it,” said Mirco Santarelli, a Cantiano resident. “But all
around here, with the people living in the valley area, it became a bowl (of
water). It was panic.”
“You could
see cars in the middle of the road that drifted away in the flood, debris
everywhere, screams. It was chaos,” Santarelli told The Associated Press.
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