More than 36,000 people have been driven from their homes by deadly flooding in northeastern Italy, regional officials said, as rising waters engulfed more homes and new landslides isolated hamlets.
Fourteen people were killed this week after streets in the towns and villages of the Emilia-Romagna region were turned into rivers.
A helicopter involved in efforts to restore electricity crashed near Lugo on Saturday, injuring one of the four occupants, the fire service said.
The intense flooding caused more than 305 landslides and damaged or closed more than 500 roads in the region.
Video footage from the affected towns showed cars submerged and homes flooded, while some residents cycled or paddled through the watery streets.
Bologna mayor Matteo Lepore said on Saturday it would take “months and in some places maybe years” for roads and infrastructure to be repaired.
Al Jazeera’s Hoda Abdel-Hamid, reporting from the Emilia-Romagna region of Faenza, said the damage was “everywhere”.
“The city is covered in mud and people are beginning to understand the magnitude of what has disappeared — past and present,” she said.
Faenza, known for its ceramics, discovered the minute-by-minute damage. “People are doing their best to save works of art,” said Abdel-Hamid.
The local library reported that more than 10,000 books were lost to the flooding.
In the town of Lugo, some evacuated flood victims sheltered in a national museum, where volunteers provided cots for them to sleep on.
“I’m very happy here… But I feel bad,” 74-year-old evacuee Gabriella Valenti told Reuters. “I may be among the luckiest… I still have a house, but there are people who have lost everything. They don’t know what to do to make us feel good.”
The floods are the latest in a series of extreme weather events that have plagued Italy over the past year as exceptional disasters have once become a regular part of life.
The same area of Emilia-Romagna was hit by extreme weather in early May, with at least two people killed in storms.
Heavy rains followed months of drought that had dried out the land, reducing its ability to absorb water, meteorologists said.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she would leave the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Hiroshima a day ahead of schedule to lead the response to the floods.
“I have decided to return to Italy. Honestly, I can’t stay so far away from Italy at such a difficult time. After being away for two days and more, my conscience demands that I come back,” she told a news briefing , adding that she had informed the other G7 leaders.
Earlier in the day, Meloni thanked G7 leaders and everyone from other countries who had expressed their solidarity with Italy and those affected by the floods.
“Your proximity is a tangible sign of our cohesion in difficult times. Thank you,” she said in a tweet.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Unipol Gruppo agreed to join forces to help people hit by floods in northern Italy connect to the internet, facilitating rescue operations, the Italian insurer said on Saturday.
Under the agreement, Unipol acquired SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet terminals and will make them available to rescuers, hospitals and the public. SpaceX is positioning its satellites to prioritize the Emilia-Romagna region and provide better coverage.
“SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla are happy to be of assistance in any way to help Italy and the people affected by the floods,” Musk said in a statement.
Musk founder SpaceX, which sent more than 5,000 Starlink Internet satellite dishes to Ukraine in the days following Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Emilia-Romagna regional president Stefano Bonaccini said the region will recover from the devastating floods by learning lessons from the 2012 earthquake.
“If there’s one lesson we’ve learned from the earthquake, it’s that any emergency situation requires rapid and rapid reconstruction,” Bonaccini said.
“Nothing will stop,” the governor told reporters, referring to business, tourism and other activities in the wealthy northern region.