ZCZC
BFF-38
ITALY-WEATHER-LEAD
Death toll from Italy storms surges past 30
ROME, Nov 4, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Floods have killed 12 people on the southern
island of Sicily, nine of them from the same family, rescue services said
Sunday, taking 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.
The victims included children aged one, three, and 15.
Three other members of the family managed to escape, one by climbing a
tree, the Agi news agency reported.
“I lost everything, I have nothing left, just my daughter,” one of the
survivors, Giuseppe Giordano, told journalists.
His wife, two other children, his parents, brother, and sister all died, he
said.
After flying over Casteldaccia Sunday, Sicilian prosecutor Ambrogio
Cartosio described a “total disaster”.
Officials have opened an investigation to determine whether houses built
near the river met legal safety norms.
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 to help a colleague trapped
there. A passenger in the car is still 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 condition of the main roads on the
Mediterranean island Sunday.
Earlier this week, floods in Sicily closed many roads and mayors ordered
schools, public parks, and underpasses shut.
– A week of deadly storms –
Italy has dealt with a series of deadly storms for a week now, especially
in the north and around Venice.
The severe weather has caused massive damage and disruption. Trees in
mountainside forests in the northeast of the country were flattened like
matchsticks.
“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.”
On Sunday, after flying over the region with Italy’s Interior Minister
Matteo Salvini, Zaia said the storms had destroyed 100,000 hectares (247,000
acres) of pine forest in all.
Salvini posted photos of the devastation in a series of tweets Sunday after
flying over the Alpine town of Belluno.
“We need 40 billion euros ($45.5 billion) to secure the national
territory,” he said.
He pledged to collect and spend that sum but, in a barbed aside to the
European Union, said he hoped his plans would not provoke overspending
complaints from Brussels.
Europe has objected to Italy’s proposed budget, which it says will worsen
the country’s already huge deficit.
The canal city of Venice, on Italy’s northeast coast, has also experienced
some of its worst flooding ever, and withstood winds of up to 180 kilometres
an hour (110 miles an hour).
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.
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/RY/1958 hrs