A deluge fell on the Marche region, east of the country. For many, the damage could have been attenuated if the adequate prevention measures had been implemented.
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“May God come to help us.” It is a message of despair that Riccardo Pasqualini wrote on Facebook on the night of Thursday September 15 to Friday, September 16. The mayor of Barbara, a town of 1,257 inhabitants, could only see, helpless, the flood falling on this small town of the steps, located east of Italy. In his message, Riccardo Pasqualini has enjoined residents to stay at home and do not take their car in any case, at the risk of losing their lives.
These new thunderstorms again surprised their violence. In just six hours, it fell more than 400 mm of precipitation in the region, a third of the annual rain volume, said Fabrizio Curzio, the chief of civil protection, who went to the scene in the Friday morning. In the village of Cantiano, located about fifty kilometers from Barbara, more in the land, some residents have filmed the water reaching the waist. On many videos shared on social networks, we see cars carried away by rivers of mud.
The assessment of this new extreme climatic episode is very heavy. Civil protection has indeed identified ten dead and three missing, including two children. About fifty people were also hospitalized and 150 others were forced to leave their homes.
Nearly 200 firefighters were mobilized to help the victims. Some help came from the neighboring regions of the Abbruzzes or the Emilie-Romagne. The images showed them on board pneumatic canoes going up of the alleys transformed into torrents. The army has also made available two helicopters to contribute to rescue operations. 2> “Seven violent climatic phenomena since July”
A few hours after the drama, impressive images of the European satellite Copernicus gave the measure of the violence of these storms and the destructive force of the ravine. Since space, we see that the mudslides have entered the Adriatic Sea up to 80 km beyond the ribs.
These violent thunderstorms are only a new episode of a long series of climatic disasters that this area of the Mediterranean basin has known since the beginning of the summer. “It is a situation very similar to the violent thunderstorms that swept Corsica on August 18, just like the Liguria and Tuscany,” said the climatologist Luca Mercalli, president of the Italian meteorology society, which pleads for better information. “Italians have no education on how to behave” in the face of these episodes as violent as sudden, he notes.
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