Travel  |  Business World  |  Women's World  |  Entertainment

Change Your Life!

Five flood victims buried as state of emergency ends

News
Sports
Chat
Travel
Dhaka Today
Yellow Pages
Higher Education
Ask a Doctor
Weather
Currency Rate
Horoscope
E-Cards
B2K Poll
Comment on the Site
B2K Club

October 23, 2000 

ROME (AP) - A little mountain village in northern Italy buried five victims of last week's devastating high water and mudslides on Sunday, the day a state of emergency finally ran out.

Floodwaters throughout the region, including the raging Po River, have ebbed, emptying into the Adriatic and revealing a rising toll of damage. Some roads and bridges are still closed and could remain so for some time, officials say.

The death toll from the raging floodwaters and fearsome mudslides reached 37 combined for the Alpine region of northern Italy and southern Switzerland. Eighteen of those were from the Valle d'Aosta in the Italian Alps.

At the church of San Maurizio in Fenis, a mountain hamlet near the city of Aosta, villagers paid their final respects to five local victims. Among them, double losses for two families - a father and son in one, a mother and daughter in another.

Amid the grief in communities throughout the stricken area, life was slowly returning to something resembling normal. But thousands were still unable to go back to their drenched or damaged homes and a huge task of rebuilding lay ahead. Authorities estimate the damage in the hundreds of million of dollars.