ROME – 11 people are dead and at least 4 others are missing after an overnight downpour that dumped more than a foot of rain on a central Italian coastal area, officials said Friday, turning the streets rivers, blocking bridges and highways, and leaving thousands of people homeless. electricity or gas.
The downpour swept through the central Marche region, inland from the coastal cities of Senigallia and Ancona, overwhelming several small towns. In a post on social mediaFirefighters said they had rescued dozens of people sheltering on rooftops or in trees.
A civil protection official, Luigi d’Angelo, said that about 16 inches of rain fell in two to three hours. “It was an extremely stressful event,” he told ANSA news agency.
The storm is just the latest destructive meteorological event in Italy over the course of a summer, it also includes one of the worst drought In recent history, this has caused a severe damage to the agricultural sector of the country.
Coldiretti, a union of Italian agricultural producers, said in a statement on Thursday that this summer has been the worst summer in a decade for severe weather, with 1,642 events including hail, flash floods, high winds and severe rainstorms.
Data from Severe weather database in Europe “There’s been a fivefold increase since the beginning of the decade” in the number of events, says Coldiretti.
Italy’s long hot summer has been repeatedly interrupted by intense rains, the association said in a statement, “a clear trend of climate tropicalization with a devastating impact on production.” agriculture and people’s lives,” the association said in a statement. industry has topped 6 billion dollars.
Flooding is a complex phenomenon caused by many factors, including soil development and ground conditions. While linking climate change to a single flood event requires extensive scientific analysis, climate change, which already causes more rainfall in multiple storms, is increasingly closing important role in the whole. The warmer atmosphere holds and releases more water, whether in the form of rain or dense winter snow.
Antonello Pasini, a scientist with the Italian National Research Council, says that man-made climate change is affecting the Mediterranean with a strong alternation between hot air intrusions from the south and cold spells from the north. That, in turn, is “creating disasters that we unfortunately see more and more often,” he said.
