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ITALY-WEATHER WRAP
Italy storms claim 12 more lives
ROME, Nov 4, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Floods have killed 12 people on the southern
Italian island of Sicily, nine of them from the same family, rescue services
said Sunday, raising the week’s toll across Italy past 30.
Six Italian regions remain on high alert for storms.
The bodies of nine people were found in their house in Casteldaccia in the
Palermo region, next to a small river which had burst its banks, rescue
services said. Among the victims was a one-year-old baby and children aged
three and 15.
Three other members of the same family managed to escape, one of them by
climbing a tree, the Agi news agency reported.
“It is an immense tragedy,” the local mayor said Sunday.
In a separate incident, a 44-year-old man was found dead in his car near
Vicari, also in the Palermo region.
He had been trying to reach a service station he managed to help a
colleague trapped there. A passenger in the car is missing.
Rescue workers are also searching for a doctor forced by the storms to
abandon his car near the town of Corleone after trying to drive to work at
the hospital there.
Two other people, a man and a woman, died after their car was caught in
the floods in the region of Agrigente, a little further south on the island.
Troops were deployed to check the conditions of the main roads on the
Mediterranean island Sunday.
Earlier this week, floods in Sicily had closed many roads and mayors
ordered schools, public parks and underpasses shut.
– A week of deadly storms –
Italy has been hit by a series of deadly storms over the past week,
especially in the north and around Venice. They have claimed more than 30
lives in all, including the Sicily deaths, and caused massive damage and
disruption.
Forests in the northeast of the country were flattened like matchsticks.
Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Salvini described the devastated
territory and posted photos in a tweet Sunday after flying over the Alpine
town of Belluno.
The picturesque fishing village of Portofino near Genoa, a famed holiday
resort on the Italian riviera, was only reachable by sea after the main road
collapsed. An emergency path opened to let residents out was deemed too
dangerous.
Trees covering the mountains in the Dolomites range were reduced to
matchsticks, flattened by winds that tore through the Veneto region on
Thursday. “It’s like after an earthquake,” said the governor of the Veneto
region, Luca Zaia. “Thousands of hectares of forest were razed to the ground,
as if by a giant electric saw.”
The canal city of Venice, on Italy’s northeast coast, has also experienced
some of its worst flooding ever, as well as having to withstand winds of up
to 180 kilometres an hour (110 miles an hour).
Italy’s civil protection agency has described the weather lashing the
country this week as “one of the most complex meteorological situations of
the past 50 to 60 years”.
BSS/AFP/FI/ 1703 hrs