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“Since 1.35pm yesterday, when the call came to 112 and from there to our operations centre, we have never stopped searching. In fact, thirty of us left and today there are ten more of us including aquatic rescuers working on the surface, divers, colleagues with drones even with night vision goggles.” Speaking to Adnkronos is Giorgio Basile, provincial commander of the Udine Fire Brigade, on the site of the search for the three boys missing on the Natisone river. “We continued to look for them all night and we will continue to do so. A cell phone of one of the girls was connected, a little further down the valley, and now we are in the area to recover the phone”, he adds.
“We can also count on the ordinary teams that collaborate on various fronts, all coordinated by a local command post located in the Red Cross headquarters which is a bit like the brain of the rescue machine. Here we coordinate all the firefighters of all the specialties explains the commander, we have people in the operations room who monitor and record all the activities in order to prepare the next interventions. It is also a coordination point for the other forces in play, such as Alpine Rescue, civil protection. The rescue structures moved immediately and promptly but the situation is complicated”.
“We are moving on various fronts, with drones, the helicopter and directly in the water with aquatic rescuers and divers. However, the conditions of the river are still quite critical, there remains a certain level of danger also for the safety of the operators, it is a very treacherous river. At the moment it is drizzling every now and then, but the main element is not so much the rain, it is the power of the river, the very strong currents: there are gorges, the backwash of the water and even for very expert people it is a particularly treacherous task.” The moment when the boys were overwhelmed by the flood was dramatic. “We were already on site, says Basile, we had already thrown the rope, but they were literally swallowed up by the flood wave before our eyes. We saw them disappear, with all that this entails from a psychological point of view for the operators who were on the scene. We are used to saving people, but in this case the event was so overwhelming that the force of nature conquers everything. These are very touching scenes even for a rescuer.” (by Silvia Mancinelli)
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