Sardinia Storm Leaves 16 Dead

Updated Nov. 19, 2013 9:19 a.m. ETMILAN—Italy declared a state of emergency in Sardinia on Tuesday after a violent storm ravaged the island, killing at least 16 people.
Heavy rains sent floodwaters surging through towns, especially along the northeastern coast.

Photos

A flooded garage in Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia, on Tuesday. Giuseppe Ungari/European Pressphoto Agency

“It’s a drama of incredible proportions,” Prime Minister Enrico Letta told a local radio station after his cabinet announced the disbursement of €20 million ($27 million) for the rescue effort. “The first thing now is to save human lives,” he said.
Rescue workers were searching for at least two people who were still missing and were helping more than 2,000 others evacuate their submerged homes, according to an official at the civil protection agency.
Cyclone Cleopatra hit the island off the western coast of the Italian peninsula late Monday, drenching some regions with 450 millimeters of rainfall—an amount equivalent to what they usually receive in six months, Franco Gabrielli, head of the civil protection agency, told local television.

“It was an explosion of water,” one unidentified man told the TG1 television news program from Olbia, the northeastern town that was the worst hit by the storm.
In a desperate attempt to avoid the rising waters, people climbed into trees or onto the roofs of their homes. Television images showed rushing brown water flooding roads, railway lines, farms and towns. One bridge collapsed, costing the life of a police officer. Parts of the island lost electricity. The storm also forced the closure of Olbia’s airport.
“It’s a tragedy,” the town’s mayor, Giovanni Giovannelli, told TgCom24 television news channel. The scenes of devastation were reminiscent of previous storms that have struck other coastal areas of Italy, which are prone to disasters because of deforestation and overdevelopment.
One poignant tragedy occurred in Arzachena, a small town near Olbia, where a Brazilian family of four drowned in three metres of water that had rushed into their basement apartment, according to local police.
In 2011, flash floods and mudslides swept through villages on the Ligurian coast, obliterating houses and killing their residents. Massimo Crivelli, editor of L’Unione Sarda newspaper in Sardinia, told local television the damage caused by the storm on the island could partly be blamed on a lack of prevention as well as construction in areas at risk of flooding.
Write to Gilles Castonguay at gilles.castonguay@wsj.com

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