Although there have been episodes of severe bad weather in recent days, the hailstorm the city of more intense Turin he experienced it on the afternoon of Friday 24 May with some roads transformed into white rivers and traffic at a standstill due to the large quantity of ice falling from the sky.
The most affected areas
The city areas most affected by the white river were the northern districts of the Piedmontese capital, in particular Sassi, Santena, Barriera di Milano, Madonna di Campagna and San Donato. Especially in these areas, around 5.30pm all hell broke loose with a hailstorm that caused several centimeters of ice to accumulate: the streets they also transformed into rivers of water due to the rain that fell at the same time. Due to the mix, endless queues of cars have been created on the junction that leads from Turin to Caselle airport: the municipal police have tried to make traffic flow more smoothly by intervening in the most critical points of the city. Trees have also fallen on the corner with the water reaching the level of the car doors: some flooding of cellars and ground floors of homes has also been reported.
Yellow warning of bad weather
The Arpa (Regional Agency for Environmental Protection) of Piedmont had already issued ayellow alert due to storm phenomena of strong intensity as actually occurred. In recent days, the ARPA had also made it known that the month of May 2024 has already gone down in history for the highest rainfall accumulations in the last 70 years in Piedmont, most of which were concentrated from March onwards when they were recorded “about 550 mm average on the regional territory, half of what it normally rains in a year, surpassing the previous record of the spring of 1977 (546 mm on average) and the most recent one of 2013 (530 mm)”.
Not only that, but in spring 2024 the days considered to have “significant rainfall”, i.e. those in which more than 5 mm fall”so far there have been 30, or 38% of the useful time, almost double what we observe in a “normal” spring.
As if that wasn’t enough, since the beginning of 2024 the rainfall in Piedmont has been double (+110%) “rcompared to the average of the period in the thirty-year climate reference period 1991-2020, so much so that the cumulative quantities on 21 May (750 mm) are the same as those normally observed at the end of the first ten days of October”, the experts explain.
