In flood-stricken area of Italy, residents fear more
When floods hit in this northern Italian town this past week, overflowing a local watercourse and sending water gushing into streets and the surrounding fields, Irinel Lungu, 45, retreated with his wife and toddler to the second floor of their home.
As rescue workers navigated submerged streets in dinghies to deliver baby formula and rescue older people from their homes, the couple watched in the cold as the water rose higher and higher.
Downstairs, the “water was up to my chest,” he said Saturday, adding, “We had nowhere to go.”
Relief has not yet come to some parts of Lugo and other northern Italian towns that were inundated with floods in which 14 people died and thousands were rendered homeless. Swelled rivers and canals have submerged vast swaths of the countryside. Hundreds of dangerous landslides have paralyzed much of the area. And some landlocked towns in the mountains are completely isolated, essentially reachable only by helicopter.
On Saturday, as rain fell again, residents around the ancient city of Ravenna — once the capital of the Byzantine Empire — were facing the deluge while receding waters in some of the hardest-hit towns revealed warped and waterlogged furniture piled next to broken kitchen appliances. Soaked sofas sank into the mud. Bottles of olive oil and canned goods, covered in mud, lined the streets. A car, lifted by the rushing water, teetered precariously on a garden fence.
The floods have upended tens of thousands of lives in the region, Emilia-Romagna, as exceptional weather in some areas brought about half the typical annual rainfall in 36 hours. And experts say it no longer may be so exceptional. Extreme weather events have become more commonplace in Europe, from the violent storms and raging floods that killed dozens in Germany two years ago to the scorching temperatures that set records in a normally temperate Britain in July. Italy has suffered its own fair share of extreme events, caught between bouts of extreme drought that parch towns, cripple agriculture and dry out the country's breadbasket, and then torrential rains and floods such as those of this past week.
The extremes make for a brutal cycle in which hillsides stripped of trees by summer wildfires, and lands desiccated by drought, fail to absorb rainfall — in this case biblical amounts of it. The pattern could leave millions of Italians surrounded by water now, but, in the summer, thirsting for a drop.
Last summer, the land was so dry “that you could see cracks,”