Fierce winds raze forests in Italy
Rome: Fierce winds and rains have killed at least 20 people in Italy this week and razed thousands of hectares of forests in the country’s devastated north, officials said.
An 87-year-old woman and a 62-year-old German tourist were killed Friday after being struck by lightning in Sardinia.
It brings to 20 the number of people killed by bad weather in Italy since the start of the week, according to the country’s civil protection agency, with meteorologists predicting further wind and rain throughout the weekend.
Trees covering the mountainsides 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,” Veneto governor Luca Zaia said.
“Thousands of hectares of forests were razed to the ground.”
In addition, 160,000 people in the region were left without electricity, Zaia said, adding that parts of the Dolomites were “reduced to looking like the surface of the moon”.
“We’ve been brought to our knees,” the politician said.
The storms in northern Italy on Thursday killed two pensioners aged 74 and 73 when a tree fell on their car in the Aosta Valley.
Another person fell into a river in the Brescia region and was dragged under by the current.