It was the afternoon of 2 May 2023 and a first flood began in the Romagna area, in particular in the areas of Faenza and Forlì, which, in light of the subsequent one on 16 May, can certainly be considered of lesser magnitude, but which it is then linked to it, making it even more disastrous.
On the afternoon of Tuesday 2 May it happened the breaking of the banks of the Sillaro near via Merlo in Villa Serraglio, between Massa Lombarda and Conselice. The surrounding countryside began to flood. The order was given to evacuate the residents of via Cardinala and via Montalbotto. In Casola Valsenio and Riolo Terme the rains caused the first landslides. From there the situation worsened quickly: the Lamone and Senio flooded, Faenza woke up underwater and 250 people were evacuated. The first victim of the flood was recorded in Castel Bolognese. All these areas then found themselves experiencing a much worse “encore” just 13 days later.
Flood one year later: all the news
The expert: “That was already a two-hundred-year flood”
That flood “can be classified as a two-hundred-year flood, that is, one that occurs on average every two hundred years”, explains the official of the Regional Agency for Territorial Security Fausto Pardolesi. But if that of 2-3 May was already an exceptional event, this one ends up in the background if we consider, however, that “a combination of the two floods in close proximity can occur every 1,000-1,500 years”, confirms the expert.
That of May 2-3 is also the phenomenon that largely caused the exceptional mud characteristic of the catastrophic event of May 16, while the first was essentially a flood of water alone. “The two phenomena combined: when there was rainfall on May 16, in fact, the ground in the Apennines was already soaked in water and unable to absorb any more,” explains Pardolesi.
This determined the disaster: the mountain slopes and river banks, already made unstable by the rainfall of 1-3 May, crumbled in the flood of a few days later and the volume of water swelled. This brought not only an endless mass of water downstream, but also silt which increased its volume and devastating capacity.
