(ANSA) - Torrential rain and storms have claimed the lives of at least five people in southern Italy over the past 24 hours. Civil protection authorities said two other people were still missing and feared dead.
The violent storms began battering the south on Saturday, causing widespread damage, flooding and mudslides. The worst hit regions have been Puglia on the heel of Italy, where a bridge collapsed and a train derailed, and the island of Sicily.
In the town of Cassano delle Murge, not far from the Puglia port of Bari, three people died and two were missing when a bridge over a normally dry river bed was demolished by a wall of water. The bridge gave way as two cars carrying seven members of the same family were driving across it.
Rescue workers recovered the dead bodies of three of the family members, a married couple in their 50s and a youth, and were still searching for the other two. They said there was little hope of finding them alive. The two survivors, who managed to scramble to safety, were in hospital being treated for injuries.
Meanwhile, 22 people suffered minor injuries when a high-speed Eurostar train derailed near Bari at 6.40 a.m. on Sunday morning. The last carriage of the train, which was travelling from Taranto to Milan, came off the rails in a hilly area hit by a landslide. In another incident to the south of Bari, a 24-year-old man died after a torrent of mud and rain smashed into his car and swept it into the sea.
In Catania in Sicily, rescue workers found the dead body of a 46-year-old man who went missing yesterday while out on a hunting trip. The man drowned after being swept into the sea by a flood of rain.
President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi expressed his condolences for the victims while Bari Mayor Michele Emiliano asked for a state of emergency to be declared. The storms damaged homes and vehicles while numerous roads were cut off due to flooding. Emiliano said there were seven towns in the region which had been particularly hard hit. Civil Protection Department chief Guido Bertolaso said
that Puglia saw the same amount of rain fall in three hours on Sunday night that it usually sees fall over the entire year.
"In just three hours, 161 millimetres of rain fell on a limited area of the region... It's unbelievable - a rare phenomenon that only happens once every hundred years," he said.
But Bertolaso also criticised local authorities, saying unsafe land was being used for construction.
"Once again, we are dealing with tragedies caused by a lack of care for the land and the desire to build where particularly strong currents can pass, even if it's only once every century," he said.
Referring to the collapsed bridge, he said that "we have to ask ourselves how this bridge could have been built when it's obvious that what was beneath was an old river bed." The rain abated in the south on Sunday afternoon and several days of dry weather were forecast. Meanwhile, the region of Liguria on the northwest coast of Italy was on the alert after being hit by heavy storms which caused some flooding and damage.
