Family of 9 dead in Sicily floods, millions of trees felled
ROME: Floods have killed 12 people on the southern Italian island of Sicily, nine of them from the same family, rescue services said yesterday, 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 yesterday.
In a separate incident, a 44-yearold man was found dead in his car near Vicari, also in the Palermo region.
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.
Italy, especially in the north and around Venice, has been hit by a series of strong storms which have claimed at least 20 lives and caused massive damage and disruption.
Trees covering the mountains in the Dolomites range were reduced to matchsticks, f lattened by winds that tore through the Veneto region on Thursday.
Coldiretti, the association of Italian agricultural companies, said in a statement that gales had destroyed around 14 million trees, many in the far north.
Areas from the far northeast to Sicily in the southwest have been affected by the storms, with the worst damage in the northern regions of Trentino and Veneto – the region around Venice – where villages and roads have been cut off by landslides.
In the Alps near Belluno, 100 km north of Venice, pine trees and red spruces were snapped wholesale like matchsticks.
The surface of the Comelico Superiore dam, farther north near the Austrian border, was covered with the trunks of trees that had fallen into the Piave river.
“We’ll need at least a century to return to normality,” Coldiretti said.
Many of the squares and walkways of Venice itself have been submerged in the highest floods the canal city has seen in a decade.
“It’s like after an earthquake,” Veneto governor Luca Zaia said. – AFP/Reuters