As the heavy rainfall continued to pour down on Italy, rescuers worked tirelessly throughout the night to save those trapped in their homes. The devastating floods in the northern Emilia-Romagna region have claimed 13 lives, with thousands more left homeless and entire cities and towns inundated.
Among the dead were an elderly couple in Cava, who were trapped inside their home. A neighbour described hearing their cries for help, but trying in vain to rescue them. An 80-year-old man drowned in his cellar, while a couple was swept away by the floods in their field opposite their home. A 76-year-old man was killed after being hit by a landslide in his garden, and another man died after falling into a well while trying to pump water away from his property.
Firefighters carried out over 2,000 rescue operations across the region, with many elderly people and families being rescued from rooftops by helicopters. Paolo Meoni, a volunteer working in Cesena, described the efforts of rescuers, saying, “We worked all night in the pouring rain. In some cases, we carried the elderly and disabled in our arms and brought them on a dinghy to rescuers, who in turn transported them to shelters.”
The floods have destroyed homes, shops, and farms, with over 5,000 agricultural businesses affected. The owner of a shop in Faenza, which has been selling kitchen equipment since 1950, said, “We’ve been cleaning up since 6am, I don’t know what time we’ll finish. I live outside Faenza and in 2014 there was a flood, but nothing like this – I’ve never seen anything like this one, nobody here has.”
Rain Pours Down in Italy, Trapping Elderly and Disabled in HomesExperts say that the floods are the worst to affect Italy in a century, with Six months’ worth of rain falling in just two weeks. Pierluigi Randi, the president of Ampro, the association of weather experts, warned, “We need to prepare ourselves, this is the climate crisis.”Before the floods, Emilia-Romagna and other areas of northern Italy were blighted by a drought that dried out the land, reducing its capacity to absorb water.
The floods have also highlighted the urgent need for better mobile phone reception in the region, as many areas have been cut off due to landslides and lack of signal. The mayor of the Forlì-Cesena region, Enzo Lattuca, said that the biggest problem was now the hillside areas that have been hit by landslides and trying to reach people there – many have been cut off because of the landslides, he explained.
As the region begins to recover from the devastating floods, officials are warning that the damage will be quantitatively smaller, but still amount to a few billion euros. The president of Emilia-Romagna, Stefano Bonaccini, has compared the devastation to the earthquake that hit the region in 2012, saying, “We will rebuild everything as we did for the earthquake.”