More than 36,000 people have been forced from their homes by deadly floods in northeastern Italy, regional officials said, as rising waters swallowed more homes and new landslides isolated hamlets.
Fourteen people died this week after streets in the cities and towns of the Emilia-Romagna region were turned into rivers.
A helicopter involved in efforts to restore electricity crashed near Lugo on Saturday, injuring one of the four people on board, the fire service said.
The storm surges caused more than 305 landslides and damaged or closed more than 500 roads in the region.
Video footage from the affected towns showed cars submerged in water and houses flooded, while some residents rode bicycles or paddled through the watery streets.
Matteo Lepore, Bologna’s mayor, said on Saturday that it would take “months, and in some places maybe years” before roads and infrastructure are repaired.
Al Jazeera’s Hoda Abdel-Hamid, reporting from the city of Faenza in the Emilia-Romagna region, said the damage was visible “everywhere”.
“The city is covered in mud and the people are beginning to understand the extent of what is gone – present and past,” she said.
Faenza, which is known for its ceramics, discovered the damage “minute by minute”. “People are doing their best to save pieces of art,” Abdel-Hamid said.
The local library reported that more than 10,000 books were lost due to the floods.
In the town of Lugo, some evacuated flood victims took shelter in a national museum, where volunteers provided cots to sleep on.
“I’m very happy here… But I feel bad,” 74-year-old evacuee Gabriella Valenti told Reuters. “I am perhaps one of the luckiest… I still have a house, but there are people who have lost everything. They don’t know what to do to make us feel good.”
The floods are the latest in a series of extreme weather events to hit Italy in recent years as exceptional disasters have once become a regular part of life.
The same area of Emilia-Romagna was hit by extreme weather at the start of May, with at least two people dying during storms.
Heavy rain followed months of drought that parched the country, reducing its ability to absorb water, meteorologists said.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she would leave the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Hiroshima a day earlier than scheduled to lead the response to the floods.
“I decided to come back to Italy. Honestly, I can’t stay so far from Italy at such a difficult time. After two days and more away, my conscience demands that I come back,” she told a news conference, adding that she had informed the other G7 leaders.
Earlier in the day, Meloni thanked the G7 leaders and everyone from other countries who expressed solidarity with Italy and those affected by the floods.
“Your closeness is a tangible sign of our togetherness in difficult times. Thank you,” she said in a tweet.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Unipol Gruppo have agreed to join forces to help people hit by floods in northern Italy connect to the internet, facilitating rescue operations, the Italian insurer said on Saturday.
Under the agreement, Unipol acquired SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet terminals and will make them available to rescuers, hospitals and the public. SpaceX is positioning its satellites to prioritize the Emilia-Romagna region and provide improved coverage.
“SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla are happy to be of use in any way they can to help Italy and the people affected by the flooding,” Musk said in a statement.
Musk founded SpaceX, which sent more than 5,000 Starlink satellite Internet dishes to Ukraine in the days after Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Emilia-Romagna regional president Stefano Bonaccini said the region would recover from the devastating floods by implementing lessons from the 2012 earthquake.
“If there’s a lesson we’ve learned from the earthquake, it’s that any emergency requires quick and rapid rebuilding,” Bonaccini said.
“Nothing will stop”, the governor told reporters, referring to business, tourism and other activities in the rich northern region.
