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PARIS / ROME: A firefighter died and some people were missing in France and Italy after a storm hit the border regions of the two countries, causing severe flooding that washed away roads and damaged homes, authorities said on Saturday (October 3) .
The storm, nicknamed Alex, devastated several towns around the city of Nice on the French Riviera.
Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi called it the worst flood disaster in the area in more than a century after flying over the worst affected area by helicopter.
“Roads and some 100 houses were swept away or partially destroyed,” he told French news channel BFM.
At least eight people were missing in France, authorities said. These included two firefighters whose vehicle was swept into a swollen river, according to local witnesses cited by various French media.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said a police officer previously listed as missing in the town of Saint-Martin-Vesubie north of Nice and near the Italian border had been found safe and sound.
Local media showed how the rain had collapsed a main road around the town.
Later, Darmanin was to visit the region accompanied by Prime Minister Jean Castex.
Eric Ciotti, a member of the French parliament for Saint-Martin-Vésubie, said several villages were isolated because they are located in steep valleys in the mountainous region.
Meteo France said 500mm of rain was recorded over 24 hours in some areas, the equivalent of about four months of rain at this time of year.
“The situation is catastrophic in some communes,” Ciotti told AFP.
On Friday it had witnessed strong winds that brought heavy rain across large swaths of France, knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes along the western Atlantic coast and causing destructive flooding in the southeast.
Storm Alex hit Brittany overnight, with wind gusts reaching 186 km per hour at Belle-Ile-en-Mer, an island off the coast near Nantes.
Authorities in the southern region of the Maritime Alps had been put on alert on Friday and around 12,000 people in three valleys north of Nice were without power on Saturday afternoon.
“We are stunned. We saw how the Vesubie (river) overflowed, everything was swept away, including part of the old iron bridge,” Serge Franco, an elderly resident of Roquebilliere, inside Nice, told AFP while rescue helicopters they were flying over.
“My house is habitable, but half of my land has been razed,” said another resident, Guillaume Andre, who was evacuated overnight but returned to see the devastation after sunrise.
There was more rain than on October 3, 2015, when floods killed 20 people in and around the city of Cannes on the French Riviera, Jérémy Crunchant, director of civil protection, told France Info.
In Italy, at least one person died and as many as 11 were missing, local authorities said.
A firefighter was killed by a tree fall in the Aosta Valley region, while three people in a van were swept away by floods in Val Roya, on the French border.
Six German hikers were among those missing after being unable to return from a trip to the mountains of Cuneo province.
Officials from the Piedmont region reported a record 630mm of rain in just 24 hours in Sambughetto, near the Swiss border. Piedmont regional chief Alberto Cirio asked the government to declare a state of emergency.
Regional authorities said 11 people were missing in the region, where several villages were cut off after the downpour left roads impassable.
Television images taken in Italy showed that several roads and bridges in the northwest of the country had been washed away by flooding and numerous rivers were reported to have overflowed.
Venice authorities expected that the city, which also suffered violent storms in August, would be submerged by an “acqua alta”, an occasional tidal surge coming from the Adriatic to reach the Venetian lagoon and flood even the iconic St. Mark’s Square.
But a complex network of 78 artificial levees placed throughout the city kept the waters out.
