At least 54 people were reported dead, 120 missing and 2,000 homeless yesterday, as rescuers began to come to terms with the full impact of the landslides which wrecked villages in the southern Italian region of Campania late on Tuesday night. Even last night, almost 48 hours after rescue operations began, firemen, soldiers and volunteers were still digging through the wreckage of mud-buried homes in the hope of finding survivors.
The Interior Ministry's Civil Protection Agency, the authority which has responsibility for co-ordinating the rescue operations, yesterday afternoon admitted that hopes of finding survivors were remote. In effect, both the Civil Protection Agency and rescue workers are convinced that the death toll is certain to rise.
Dramatic TV pictures yesterday showed the desolation wrought by landslides which hit small village communities in the mountainous area, inland and east of Naples. Six days of incessant rainfall finally led to the disaster. Houses were lifted off their foundations and transported 50 yards further down the hillside by the torrents of flood water and mud. Cars, trees, rocks and all kinds of debris were swept up and spewed down the hillsides by the sheer force of the flood water.
In many cases, victims of the disaster simply were caught unawares and did not have time to make an escape. Those more fortunate climbed onto the rooftops or upper stories of buildings whose ground floors were under up to six feet of water.
With roads still impassable, communications difficult and many homes without electricity, running water or telephone lines in the three hardest-hit provinces of Avellino, Caserta and Salerno, rescue workers yesterday had to once more rely on helicopters to reach some of the remotest villages.
Speaking in the Senate yesterday, the junior interior minister with responsibility for civil protection, Mr Franco Barberi, denied that the disaster could have been avoided, saying: "This trajedy was unavoidable. Even if all the planned public projects for dealing with geological instablilty in the Campania area had been finished in time, and they were all started in time, by the way - even then this disaster could not have been avoided."
The minister argued that mass, wildcat construction, allied to a lack of regional and local authority planning, bore the largest responsibility for the disaster. In so saying, Mr Barberi was reiterating the claims of Green Party activists and environmentalists who for long have argued that recurring natural disasters in areas like Campania (631 landslides in the last 70 years) are directly linked to over-building, which leaves the land dangerously short of tree and plant cover and therefore unstable and unable to absorb heavy rainfall.
A cabinet meeting in Rome this morning will confirm that £14 million has been set aside as an emergency relief fund for victims of the disaster.