Residents of the village of Pianello di Ostra (Italy), the day after the deluge that hit the region, September 16, 2022. ALESSANDRO DI MEO / AFP
“God help us. It is a message of desperation that Riccardo Pasqualini wrote on Facebook on the night of Thursday 15 to Friday 16 September. The mayor of Barbara, a town of 1,257 inhabitants, could only helplessly watching the deluge descend on this small town in the Marche region of eastern Italy In his message, Riccardo Pasqualini urged residents to stay at home and not take their cars under any circumstances, at the risk of losing their lives.
These storms surprised again by their violence. In just six hours, more than 400 millimeters of rain fell in the region, which is a third of the annual amount of rain, said civil protection chief Fabrizio Curzio, who was on site on Friday morning. In the village of Cantiano, about fifty kilometers from Barbara, further inland, some residents filmed themselves with water up to their waists. In many videos shared on social networks, we see cars washed away by mud rivers.
The toll of this new extreme climatic episode is very high. The civil defense has actually identified ten dead and three missing, including two children. Around 50 people were also hospitalized and 150 others had to be evacuated from their homes.
Almost 200 firefighters were mobilized to help the victims. Some help came from the neighboring regions of Abruzzo and Emilia-Romagna. The pictures showed them aboard inflatable boats going up lanes that turned into streams. The army also provided two helicopters to help with the rescue operations.
“Seven violent climate phenomena since July”
A few hours after the tragedy, stunning images from Europe’s Copernicus satellite showed the magnitude of the violence of these storms and the destructive power of the gully. From space we can actually see that the mudslides entered the Adriatic Sea up to 80 kilometers offshore.
These events are just one more episode in a long line of climate catastrophes that this area of the Mediterranean basin has been experiencing since the beginning of summer. “It’s a situation very similar to the violent storms that swept over Corsica on August 18, as well as Liguria and Tuscany,” said climatologist Luca Mercalli, president of the Italian Meteorological Society, who is asking for better information. “Italians are not educated on how to behave in the face of these violent and sudden facts,” he notes.
You still have 59.92% of this article to read. The following is for subscribers only.