Marche flood, death toll rises to 9
4 missing and 50 injured
Marche flood, death toll rises to 9.
9 dead, 4 missing and 50 wounded in the province of Ancona. This is the tragic toll offlood that hit the Marche.
There is still no sign of an 8 year old child. Among the missing is another mother with her minor daughter. The searches continue unabated. There are over 300 firefighters employed in the provinces of Ancona e Pesaro Urbino.
During the night, dozens of people who had taken refuge on the roofs of houses and in the trees were rescued.
Meanwhile, controversy erupts over the failure to alert. The mayors claim there was “none weather alert“, except for events of lesser intensity.
The Prime Minister Mario Draghi he was visiting Ostra (Ancona) in the afternoon, where he made the announcement aid for 5 million.
All this while the Ancona Prosecutor's Office opened un'inchiesta for manslaughter and culpable flooding against unknown persons.
A weather phenomenon that is impossible to predict
In reference to the evolution of the bad weather that hit part of the Marche region in the provinces of Pesaro, Urbino and Ancona, the Multi-Risk Functional Center of the Regional Civil Protection highlights the meteorological context that determined the evolution of the scenario from yellow alert issued to the one then well more complex and unpredictable which led to victims and floods in some areas of the province of Pesaro and Urbino and Ancona.
“The weather forecast for Thursday 15 September showed the possibility of thunderstorms forming on the Tyrrhenian side of the peninsula, with possible involvement of the Apennine ridge and the internal areas of the Marche. For this reason, a yellow level alert had been issued for alert zones 1 and 3 (mountain and high hilly sectors of the Pesaro and Ancona areas) due to locally intense thunderstorms.
In the other areas of the region the forecast did not show evidence of phenomena of such intensity as to cause critical issues and, therefore, the alert level was left Verde.
Thunderstorm self-healing V-shaped
On Thursday afternoon, between the provinces of Siena and Arezzo, we witnessed the formation of a so-called thunderstorm self-healing V-shaped, which, in its movement eastwards, affected the internal area of Pesaro, and then moved towards the Ancona coast. The interaction with the Apennines has also intensified the storm structure precisely in the Catria area.
A characteristic of self-healing storms – explains the Functional Center – is that of stationarity: the storm always continues to reform in the same point and always affects the same areas, even for a few hours. These are phenomena whose prediction is extremely difficult, both because they are very rare and because the dynamics that generate them often imply the presence of configurations at very small scales that are difficult to identify.
In this case, the forecast elements to estimate the extension and persistence of such intense phenomena were completely absent. Even in surveillance, at a national level, such phenomena have not been reported at all.
From yellow alert to total emergency
Basically, what was supposed to be a yellow warning scenario for thunderstorms (locally intense and rapid effects, but of limited extent), has instead evolved into a more complex and widespread scenario across the territory. The very intense and persistent rainfall, with very high cumulative amounts reached in a few hours, determined, even in the major network, the triggering and propagation of the flood wave in very rapid and unmanageable times, which then led to critical issues and problems as well in the valley and coastal part".
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