OH NO

Italy White-Water Creek Flash Floods Kill at Least 10

An official said water filled the mountain gorge so fast that people inside “catapulted out like bullets.”

At least 10 people have died in southern Italy on Monday after a white-water creek suddenly flooded in a mountain gorge and people were “hurled over rocks,” Reuters reports. Officials said 18 were rescued from Calabria’s Pollino National Park after the creek swelled due to “heavy rainfall upstream.” Six of the rescued were injured and taken to a local hospital by helicopter. The identities and nationalities of the dead are currently unknown, but many trekkers who venture in the area are Italian. Rescue teams reportedly had to use “ropes to descend the sides of the mountain to reach the site” on the Raganello creek. “This gorge filled up with water in a really short space of time and these people were catapulted out like bullets. They ended up some three kilometers [two miles] down the valley,” Carlo Tansi, head of the civil protection department in Calabria, told Reuters. The tragedy comes on the heels of a bridge collapse in northern Italy’s Genoa last week that killed 43 people.