It’s a catastrophe with an announcement. At midnight it starts to rain heavily. “At three in the morning we heard a loud bang, just like in a serious car accident,” Lisa Mocciaro told the Italian news agency Ansa. “At five o’clock the next bang followed. Streams of mud and boulders rolled through Casamicciola Terme, Rarone down to us in Piazza Bagni and finally emptied into the sea.” Up to 155 mm of rain fell in six hours of thunder, says climatologist Massimiliano Fazzini to the news portal dire.it.
Children’s author Mocciaro probably lives on the third floor of her house. But a drama is unfolding downstairs. The mud and rock avalanches take homes and cars with them. 164 people lost their homes that night. Three bodies and four wounded are recovered. The first dead is 31-year-old saleswoman Elisabetta B.*. Shortly before the avalanche destroyed her house, she called her father, who lives in the neighboring town, on her cell phone for help. When the man arrived, the building was vandalized. During the night, the helpers manage to save the lifeless daughter.
Two more families with small children are missing
Then, on Sunday afternoon, a rescue team retrieves the tiny body of a girl from a collapsed house. The child, about five years old, was found in the bedroom.
After the devastating storm on the southern Italian island of Ischia, the emergency services found a third dead. The woman’s body was discovered in the northern coastal town of Casamicciola, the responsible prefecture in Naples said Sunday afternoon.
Ten people are still missing. Among them is a family with three children, including the girl found. Another couple with a newborn baby is believed to be in the rubble. They are also looking for a man, a foreign woman and an older woman. The number of dead and injured could rise, the rescue teams fear on site.
Ischia, the “Pearl of the Gulf of Naples”, attracts many celebrities
Ischia is a popular holiday destination because of its thermal baths. The German former chancellor Angela Merkel (68) has been regularly taking a bath on the volcanic island for years. Among the most prominent regulars are movie stars such as Antonio Banderas (62), Danny DeVito (78) and Christoph Waltz (66). But the “Pearl of the Gulf of Naples” does not stand alone for Dolce Vita. It also has its drawbacks.
In the past 150 years, four other deadly natural disasters have shaken the island, which is just under 44 square kilometers in size. On July 28, 1883, an earthquake killed 126 people. At the end of May 2006, a falling rock from Mount Vezzi buried a family of four. On November 10, 2009, a flash flood swept away a 14-year-old girl. An earthquake in mid-August 2017 left two dead and several thousand homeless.
Almost every second islander was building illegally
However, it is not only storms and earthquakes that are responsible for the immense damage. With the tourists came greed. Houses were built in rows on the fragile slopes – without planning, permits and safety measures. The overexploitation mainly took place in the 1980s and 1990s.
According to a joint study by the Italian Bureau of Statistics (Istat), the National Earthquake Institute (INGV) and the Ministry of the Environment (ISPRA), 2,000 inhabitants of the island would live on 3.47 square kilometers with an increased risk of landslides. Almost half of the more than 60,000 islanders built illegally and then submitted applications for approval of the illegal buildings, writes “La Stampa”. In addition, 600 illegally built houses had to be demolished for safety reasons. Some of them are still inhabited.
*Name changed