10 people are killed in floods in Italy; survivors are rescued from trees and roofs.

CANTIANO: After hours of unusually heavy rain, flash floods raced through numerous towns in hilly central Italy on Friday, killing 10 people and left at least four others missing. Numerous people climbed into trees or onto rooftops to wait for help.
Floods invaded garages and basements and knocked down doors. In one town, the powerful rush of water pushed a car onto a second-story balcony, while elsewhere parked vehicles were crumpled on top of each other in the streets. Some farm fields near the sea were meters (yards) under water.

Barbara’s mayor, Riccardo Pasqualini, described the torrential downpour that wiped away his town on Thursday evening in the Marche area near the Adriatic Sea as “It wasn’t a water bomb, it was a tsunami.”
He said that the town’s 1,300 residents were left without drinking water by the nighttime flooding. According to Pasqualini, a mother and her small daughter were missing after attempting to flee the floods. In another part of the town, a boy was taken from his mother’s arms and saved.

Several persons who were stranded in automobiles or who had scaled trees or rooftops to escape rising floodwaters had been rescued, according to a fire department tweet. When Sassoferrato police couldn’t get to a man trapped in a car, they reached out a long tree branch and pulled him out.

On Friday, hundreds of firemen toiled in the muck to clear up fallen tree trunks and branches while looking for any victims who might have been buried under the wreckage.

 

They waded through waist-high water in flooded streets, while others paddled in rubber dinghies to scoop up survivors.

 

Until the area could be inspected for safety and mounds of mud could be removed, hundreds of people fled or were evacuated from their houses.

“You could hear shouts and see automobiles in the middle of the road that had drifted off in the flood. Santarelli told The Associated Press, “It was anarchy..