Around her makeshift bed, Ludmilla sees to it that everything is tidy. The 60-year-old is one of dozens of victims welcomed to the gymnasium of Castel Bolognese, a city devastated by the floods in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna.
“I hope to be able to go home in a month but I don’t know”. Between the despair of having had to leave her house and the anger of not having been sufficiently warned by the local authorities, this woman of Ukrainian origin prefers to give only her first name.
Arrived Wednesday in this large room converted into a dormitory with her 97-year-old husband, Ludmilla finds herself alone today: “we took him to the hospital, because we cannot keep someone of his age here”, she explains to AFP, installed on her bed.
Since then, she has been trying somehow to occupy her days, arranging her small personal space while waiting to be able to return to her house and then see the extent of the damage caused by the devastating floods of the last few days, which killed 14 people. in this region of northern Italy.
“I asked young volunteers to help me clean up on Sunday,” she says. And continues: “everything happened without warning, they (the authorities, editor’s note) said that we were going to have a little water. A little …”. Ludmilla and her husband, coming from the nearby village of Solarolo, will soon find themselves waist deep in water.
“We were stuck there, without water, without food. I called the fire brigade, the police, they brought him (her husband, editor’s note) here” before evacuating him to the hospital, explains, grateful, this mother who arrived in Italy 16 years ago and whose daughter lives in Ukraine, “under the bombs”.
Purple sweater on the back, jogging and sneakers – because “it’s still more comfortable” -, the sexagenarian is about to spend another night in this makeshift dormitory where two rows of around thirty mattresses are lined up.
A few beds away, Alfonso Brocchi and Iolanda Soglia are talking. These two septuagenarians were also surprised by the rising waters that occurred in the middle of the night.
“At 3 a.m., the neighbor upstairs called me and told me Alfonso, come up, the water is coming”, recalls, sitting on his bed, the 76-year-old pensioner, who came to the aid of his neighbor Iolanda, suffering from muscular dystrophy.
“She is disabled, so I went to see her and put her on two chairs” to prevent her from having her feet in the water, before the firefighters came to pick them up three hours later.
Around them in the gymnasium, other victims will settle in a few hours but also, on camp beds installed a little further, firefighters who will take advantage of a short night’s sleep before resuming service as soon as ‘dawn.
“Here is also a base camp for volunteers, for civil protection, for the armed forces, who can rest,” explains Stefania Corfiati, a volunteer social worker recently arrived from Bologna, about fifty kilometers from the places.
On this rainy day, the entrance to the gymnasium where water bottles, sandwiches and pastries are stored is always full. Volunteers and other firefighters rub shoulders, eat, discuss in an almost incessant flow.
In the dormitory, the hubbub of rescuers and volunteers will resonate until late in the evening, lulling the sleep of the dozen victims still present in the enclosure.
Monday evening, this municipality of 10,000 inhabitants carried out the preventive evacuation of some 200 people before the floods hit the city the next day.
To reach the gymnasium, it is a city now covered in mud that must first be crossed. The muddy waters swept away everything, sowing desolation.
“After this disaster, it’s important that everyone feels at home here,” defends Paola Barilli, who oversees around sixty volunteers in the city.
Here, “everyone is welcome, even animals!”, says this energetic 50-year-old. As proof, she wants to welcome a family who came with… nine cats.
At the entrance to the premises, paper towels, blankets and bags of clothing brought by local residents are piled up along the wall.
As the day progresses, the rows of boxes slowly lengthen towards the middle of the room – with each hoping to continue leading “as normal a life as possible”.
05/21/2023 14:16:40 – Castel Bolognese (Italie) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
