The search for French and Italian flood victims in alpine villages and nearby beaches has become even more ferocious as officials say violent rains have washed away bodies from cemeteries down the mountain.
A spokesman for France’s Alps-Maritimes regional administration, badly affected by the hurricane along the Italian territories of Liguria and Piedmont, said it was not clear where the bodies came from but the bodies found in the cemetery were washed to the Italian side.
The state of disintegration of the cemetery corpses was so advanced that they could be clearly identified from the victims of the recent storm, a spokesman told the Associated Press. Local officials said cemeteries in the French towns of Saint-Martin-de-Wasubi and Tende were partially washed away by the floods. The mayor of Tende, Jean-Pierre Vasalo, told the Parisian newspaper that the village cemetery had been “cut in two” and that the bodies had been found.
Italian local officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
A total of 12 deaths have been reported since Friday – four on the French side, eight on the Italian side. More than 600 rescuers and others are searching for about 20 people who have not yet been accounted for.
Police are going door-to-door to investigate reports of people missing in villages where roads, electricity, communications and water supply were cut off during the hurricane.
Seven black Canadian wolves also went missing after a wildlife park north of the southern French Riviera city, Nice, was swept away by floodwaters.
The French Office for Biodiversity (OFB) has warned that if the wolf is not accustomed to feeding, it could kill the wolf as soon as possible. Two wolves and a veterinarian are searching the area by helicopter after they spotted some wolves near the park.
“The priority is to find them and catch them with the help of dart guns,” Eric Hansen, OFB’s regional director, told AFP.
The Black Canadian Wolf is a large subspecies of gray wolf, weighing about 80 kg.
The body of one of the park’s three polar wolves was found while its acacia was swept away by the flood. Hansen said the other two were “probably dead”, too.
He said a third exterior with three Central European gray wolves had survived, and would become a temporary home for Canadian wolves once they met, he said.
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