MORE RAIN HITS ITALY AMID DEADLY FLOODING
Dark clouds unleashed fresh rain Friday over the drenched northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, where flooding in recent days has caused at least 14 deaths and left thousands homeless.
Hundreds of rescue workers toiled through the night to evacuate residents, free roads from mud and debris, restore electricity and repair telephone towers, while officials began to take a fuller accounting of the damage in a region that not long ago was wrestling with a persistent drought.
With many fields still soaked by rainfall that experts described as almost unheard of — some areas received nearly 20 inches in 36 hours, about half the annual average — rail services were interrupted and many roads remained blocked.
“The situation is constantly changing as it keeps raining,” said Luca Cari, a spokesperson for Italy’s firefighters. “Water is still rising in some areas on the northern coast, but even where
the water has receded, mud is everywhere and it’s hard to assess the damage.”
Heavy rain in early May had already saturated the soil, and on Tuesday a storm system moving slowly across Italy funneled extreme downpours back over the same area. With the ground already near saturation, like a sponge that is already soaked with water, the rainfall had nowhere to go except to flow to the lowest points, inundating rivers, creeks and other low-lying areas.
Television images on Friday showed tree branches, garden furniture and other debris floating in the muddy water on the streets of Cervia, a coastal town of about 30,000 people near Ravenna,
where firefighters and the civil protection agency were continuing to evacuate residents and their pets on rubber boats.
Nearly two dozen rivers broke their banks this week in a vast area between the Apennine Mountains — where hilltop villages have been left isolated by landslides — and the coast.
About 10,000 people have been evacuated in a disaster that many were attributing at least in part to a combination of climate change and human development. On Friday, mayors were asking residents to move to higher ground as the latest round of rainfall threatened more flooding.