It often happens when collecting stories and memories of the days of the flood that the emotions of those days return with a strength that often surprises the first to tell. It also happened to Riccardo Di Stefano, 30 years old, Technogym employee, referee, at the time a student in Modena where he was attending a master’s degree in sport management. Di Stefano is one of those many people from Cesena who took action to lend a hand, he did so from the very first hours of the emergency, those of rescuing people trapped in their homes and continued when it was necessary to clean the mud from the houses.
«That day I was in Modena for study reasons. When I started seeing photos and videos, I realized that the situation was worsening rapidly and like a good scout – she says, laughing – I decided to return ». The trains had already stopped running, but in the end he managed to find a ride and reach Cesena. Growing up in San Mauro in Valle, the San Rocco area was the first he thought of and as he approached the Ex Tiro a Segno street he had his fears confirmed. It was now evening and the rescuers were already working in the street together with other people who, like him, wanted to make themselves available: «There were some guys who were passionate about fishing and had a dinghy, at a certain point a doctor approached with a kayak inflatable but he didn’t know how to use it. I told him to inflate it that I was able to use it instead. At the beginning there was a discussion with the police who coordinated the rescue. The understandable fear was that further dangerous situations would be created. But the street was full of cars and floating objects and in some places their vehicles couldn’t get through so in the end they made us go.” Of those rescues he remembers above all the adrenaline and the darkness: “I don’t even know if I would be able to recognize the people I helped, it was too dark.”
The next morning it was the boys from the dinghy who contacted him: “They were going to Via Roversano where there were no rescuers at that moment.” The people who had a second floor to climb to remained in the street. From the afternoon until night, those who had been trapped in single-storey houses had been taken away and during the night the emergency had moved to the Ronta area. In the morning a new alert had arrived: there was the risk of a new flood: “No one knew what it would be like, and the false rumor of the Quarto dam was circulating to fuel the fears.” Going from house to house they took away people who had spent the night in the dark: «The houses were almost all without electricity, the cell phones were starting to run out of battery. Many were elderly and we had to convince them, explain that it was not safe to stay, that no one knew what the next flood would be like.” He talks about two Erasmus girls, one Uzbek and one Turkish, who were stuck in one of the side houses, but the rescue that left the biggest impression on him was that of a family. «They had two children, one 3-4 years old, the other a few months old. Because of the way the house was built, we couldn’t get too close, so we had to organize hand-passing, passing these children from one vehicle to another.” While he’s telling it, he has to stop, his voice breaks, “I didn’t think I’d get so emotional again – he says almost as if to justify himself -, it’s the clearest image I have of that day”.
Some of the people he saved he happened to meet. «We often say goodbye to one boy in particular: his father was one of those who wanted to leave the house, and he couldn’t reach him. He had asked us for help to convince him to leave there.” From those streets that she crossed in a kayak, disfigured by water and mud, she often returns. «I do the former Tiro a Target route every day and it still excites me a lot to think back to what it was like in those days». If he returned to help that day it was due to a certain “vocation to help”, he describes it this way, but also and above all due to the feeling of deep affection he feels for his city and which in those days he discovered he shared with many other people from Cesena . A year after that wave of solidarity, «perhaps there is little left on the surface, in the sense that it is less visible, but I believe that deep down, in those who lived through those days, the awareness of the power of union and of the community”.
