Northern Italy in the storm, woman crushed by a tree. Today still alert for 12 regions
At half past six in the afternoon, when the hell of rain and wind that has frightened all of Milan and killed a woman seems to be calming down, Mayor Sala makes an appeal to citizens on social media: "Be careful until 8 pm, please. There will be a second storm." After ten consecutive days of an African heat bubble, here comes the supercell storm that kills.
The afternoon that suddenly turns into night, a front of lead-black clouds up to ten kilometers high that advances at the speed of a cyclonic wind, a storm of lightning and hail that — as widely announced by meteorologists — overwhelms the north, Lombardy, Piedmont, Veneto, Liguria, Tuscany. Rivers that overflow, roofs blown off houses, uprooted trees, landslides and floods. In Robecchetto, a small town in the upper Milanese area, a 63-year-old woman from San Vittore Olona, returning from a walk on the Navigli, does not have time to save herself. She is hit on the head by a falling tree that also overwhelms two of her friends, a 68-year-old woman and a 70-year-old man, taken to hospital with non-serious injuries.
The orange alert that the Civil Protection bulletins had been relaunching for two days was not enough to avoid the damage. The parks remained closed since the morning, the violence of the wind and rain in mid-afternoon overwhelmed everything in its path. The flooding of the Seveso was averted with the activation of the containment basin, mobile barriers were placed to protect the Ponte Lambro neighborhood from the river's rising, and the firefighters' rescue teams managed to contain the damage of the very violent storm that hit the Milan area where the temperature dropped by more than ten degrees in a matter of minutes, reaching 18.
Rail traffic was blocked in the evening when an Italo train travelling on the Milan-Bologna line was struck by lightning near Melegnano and stopped. Passengers waiting to transfer and trains queuing on high-speed trains with delays of over an hour. There was a lot of fear and damage in Piedmont too. The Novara area was hit the hardest, where a storm blew the roof off a condominium in the residential area of San Martino. The roof of the building was literally torn off by the wind, which gusted up to 80 kilometres per hour, and fell onto the street, fortunately without causing any injuries. At times the storm took on the characteristics of a downburst with a very strong descending current. Over 40 millimetres of rain fell in just a few minutes.
An impressive electrical storm lit up the skies of Tuscany for hours with 27,000 lightning strikes recorded in twelve hours. In Montespertoli a bolt of lightning split a cypress in two. Dozens of trees also fell in Florence, on parked cars, but without causing any injuries. Sixty millimeters of rain in an hour on San Gimignano with the Civil Protection recommending people to stay away from rivers and streams. In Veneto, the provinces of Belluno and Vicenza were hit the hardest, where all the events of the white night were cancelled. Strong storms also hit Campania and Puglia, where a sudden storm overwhelmed the market in Bisceglie.
And it's not over. Italy should remain split in two for today, with three northern regions (Lombardy, Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia) on orange alert for possible new violent storms originating from cold currents descending from northern Europe and nine others (Liguria, Piedmont, Trentino Alto Adige, Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Lazio, Umbria, Marche and Campania) on yellow alert. Boiling temperatures for another 24 hours instead in the south where yesterday the firefighters were dealing with dozens of fires in Sicily and Sardinia.
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