The damage caused by the bad weather in Ventimiglia (Italy) -

Federico SCOPPA / AFP

Twenty-one of the 22 people reported missing by Italy after Storm Alex passed the northwest of the country were found near the Col de Tende, France, and were being evacuated by helicopter, a announced this Saturday evening the Italian Civil Protection.

The missing "were found in Vievola and began to be evacuated by helicopter" to the town of Limone, said Mara Anastasia, spokesperson for Civil Protection.

Among them are two Germans and their Italian grandchildren, she added.

The toll of bad weather in Italy is now one missing, a man whose car fell into a stream, and two dead: a 53-year-old firefighter who died in intervention in the Aosta Valley, and a man from 36 years old whose vehicle had fallen into the Sesia river, in Piedmont.

"Castaways of the road"

The authorities had announced earlier in the day that 22 people were missing in the border area, at the passage of the Tende pass blocked by scree, floods and landslides.

In France, a spokesperson for relief confirmed that "road castaways" had been stranded on Friday between two landslides near the Tende tunnel.

They were able to be sheltered in an old station in Vievola.

"The helicopter device has now made it possible to evacuate a large part of these people, around forty, from this very isolated part," he said.

Never seen in seventy years

According to the president of the Piedmont region, bordering on the south-east of France, these bad weather have been the most serious since 1994 when the flood of the Po and Tarano had killed 70 people.

From Ventimiglia to Biella, the heavy rains that fell from Friday afternoon on this hilly region caused flooding, landslides, landslides and caused significant material damage, damaging buildings and infrastructure, especially bridges. .

In Piedmont, many villages, with streets and houses devastated by water, are cut off from the world, without water or electricity, according to the authorities in the region, who evoke an "extremely critical" situation.

In Ventimiglia (Liguria), where Roya left his bed, the mayor Gaetano Scullino estimated "that a disaster of this kind has not happened since 1958".

The floods devastated the western part of the city, causing millions of euros in damage, according to local authorities.

“We have lost all the machines and orders for pasta, from Italy and France.

When I entered, the cold rooms were floating, ”lamented Ramon Bruno, owner of a pasta factory, to the Ansa agency.

In France, Prime Minister Jean Castex expressed this Saturday his "deep concern about the final assessment" of the severe bad weather in the Alpes-Maritimes, where eight people are reported missing after the passage of storm Alex, and where we are without news of "very many people".

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