Tuscany spent Friday counting the damage after a storm that barely paused for breath. For more than 20 hours, rain hammered the north-west of the region and the neighbouring eastern tip of Liguria, and the regional authorities kept Tuscany on a red alert, the highest level, until midnight on Thursday.
Rain gauges tell the story. Castelnuovo Magra, near La Spezia, recorded 220 millimetres in under a day, while stations in the Garfagnana hills and at Tresana logged well over 150. Streams that are normally a trickle turned into torrents, and several larger rivers, including the Frigido at Massa and the Ombrone near Pistoia, spilled over.
The biggest worry was the Serchio. Shortly after midnight the river peaked at Pontasserchio, in the province of Pisa, carrying roughly 1,400 cubic metres of water per second. The mayor of San Giuliano Terme shut the Ripafratta bridge as a precaution and families living on the floodplain were moved out. Upstream, near the medieval Devil’s Bridge at Borgo a Mozzano, the main road through the valley had to be closed.
The latest update from Tuscany’s civil protection agency lists 151 problems still unresolved out of 267 reported since the storm began. In all, 124 people remain cut off in the provinces of Arezzo, Lucca and Massa-Carrara, partly because a landslide blocked the only road to hamlets in the hills above Massa. Another 72 residents around Pisa left their homes as a precaution, and 27 people in the Pisa and Lucca areas were forced out.
Firefighters have answered more than 190 calls for help, most of them to clear mud and rocks from roads. In Massa they pulled a driver from a car trapped in a flooded underpass, and across the border in La Spezia crews used inflatable boats to reach 52 workers stranded at a factory. Officials are urging people to stay away from riverbanks, bridges and underpasses while more rain is expected.
