Huge rescue effort after deadly storm barrels across France, Italy

October 5 ------ Two people died in Italy and eight were missing in France on Saturday after storms, torrential rain and flash floods battered the border area, washing away roads and houses, cutting off whole villages and triggering landslips, as hundreds of rescuers raced to find stranded survivors. Torrential rain of up to 50 centimeters (20 inches) and high winds crashed into the border area in the latest of a string of strong storms in recent years.

Storm Alex barreled into France’s west coast on Thursday bringing powerful winds and rain across the country before moving into Italy, where regions across the north suffered an onslaught throughout Saturday. French Prime Minister Jean Castex, who inspected the damage around the city of Nice by helicopter, said there were eight people officially designated missing. But a great many more could not be contacted, he added.

“I do not hide from you our deep concern about the final outcome of this episode,” he said, adding that the government had triggered its emergency plan for handling natural disasters. “The situation is catastrophic in some communes,” regional lawmaker Eric Ciotti told AFP. Authorities in the Alpes-Maritimes region had been placed on alert Friday and around 12,000 people in three valleys to the north of Nice were without power early Saturday afternoon.

“We are thunderstruck,” said Serge Franco, a resident of Roquebilliere, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Nice, as rescue helicopters hovered overhead. “We saw the (river) Vesubie burst its banks — everything was swept away, including part of the old iron bridge,” he told AFP. “My house is habitable but half of my land has been swept away,” said another resident, Guillaume Andre. Evacuated overnight, he had returned to see the devastation after daybreak.

In Roquebilliere, the floodwaters swept away two elderly people with their house. “The firefighters did not have enough rope, and even with our rope we could not reach the house, so it was too late to get to them and the house was suddenly swept away,” resident Patrick Theus told AFP. The head of Italy’s Piedmont region said the storm was the most serious in those parts since a flood killed 70 people in 1994. The mayor of the northern Italian city of Ventimiglia, Gaetano Scullino, meanwhile said “a disaster of this kind has not happened since 1958”.

Source: mb.com.ph