Adriana Pianelli shouted to her husband and son as they disappeared into the underground car park under a sea of ??mud during a deadly storm that ravaged villages in central Italy.
“I saw her, I called Andrea! Giuseppe! But the water had risen so fast and was so thick with mud that they didn’t stand a chance,” she said, the sleeves of her pink sweater pulled over her clenched fists.
Andrea, 25, was almost out of the garage when he turned to help his father, 65-year-old Giuseppe, who slipped. All three had gone out in heavy rain to get their car to safety.
The father and son were just two of an estimated 10 people killed by the flash floods in the Marche region.
“It was like a tsunami. They were there, then they were gone,” said Adriana, who had been waiting for them on a higher level at the entrance to the garage.
Across the street, Pasquale Avallone said he nearly died when the water pouring into his home rose to his neck in seconds.
“The front door came off its hinges and I was thrown against the wall. I just managed to climb onto a closet and wait for death there,” he said.
– ‘Lost everything’ –
The 30-year-old warehouse worker choked back tears as he lifted his son’s dinosaur toys out of the mud and threw them onto the nearest pile of destroyed sofas, beds and tables that lined the street in Pianello di Ostra.
“I didn’t have much. Now I have nothing at all, nothing but a drowned parrot,” he said as he stood shirtless in shorts and rubber boots, his legs and hands caked with mud.
Villagers used brooms to sweep water out of their homes or tried in vain to scour dirt from valuables.
Laura Marinelli, 33, grabbed her 18-month-old daughter and ran upstairs to neighbors when her ground-floor home near Ostra began flooding. The only thing she took with her was a pack of diapers.
“If it had happened much later, we would have been sleeping and probably would have died,” she said, pointing to the roof she climbed onto with her baby and husband as the water continued to rise.
“We’ve lost everything, all the photos, all the letters that you can’t replace,” she told AFP news agency as pink plastic toys floated in a sunken garden nearby.
The strong odor of sewage and petrol at the height of the flood lingered in Pianello when Prime Minister Mario Draghi arrived for a blitz visit, and was harassed by a small group of locals.
“If the state doesn’t hurry to help, there will be a revolution here,” warned Avellone’s brother-in-law Marco.
“They’re quick to promise things when there’s an election campaign, but none of them can be trusted to actually do what’s needed. To do everything possible to prevent nightmares like this,” he said.
