At least six people have died in severe flooding in Tuscany, central Italy and three in Portugal, bringing to 15 the provisional death toll across western Europe from the torrential rain and record winds brought by Storm Ciarán.
Eugenio Giani, the president of Tuscany, announced a state of emergency on Friday, describing the situation as “really very serious”. It had been “a long and complex night for the entire regional civil protection system”, he said.
There had been fears the Arno River could flood the historic city of Florence after several nearby towns were swamped, but Giani said the high water point had passed at mid-morning without major incident.
A bridge collapsed near the city of Pistoia, killing two people. Another person died in the town of Rosignano, while the other two victims were elderly people living in the small town of Montemurlo, north-west of Florence, Italian media reported.
Giani said the dead included an 85-year-old man who was found drowned on the ground floor of his care home. “What happened tonight in Tuscany has a name: climate change,” Giani wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
In Prato, a city near Florence where two people, both also elderly, are reported to have died, the mayor, Matteo Biffoni, said the damage caused by the storm was “a blow to the stomach and makes you want to cry”.
The city’s Santo Stefano hospital was also engulfed with water, Biffoni said. “After a night of devastation we will roll up our sleeves to clean and try to bring our city back to normal,” the mayor told local journalists.
Two women and a man were killed off the coast of Portugal when their sailing boat capsized 35 miles north of Lisbon in heavy seas. The country’s northern coastal regions had been placed on red alert, with waves exceeding seven metres.
Several people were still missing in Tuscany and at least one in the north-eastern Veneto region, Italian authorities said. About 48,000 people had no electricity, said the deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini. The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, announced an initial state aid package of €5m (£4.3m) to help the worst-hit areas.
People were being evacuated from their homes in rubber dinghies in the Seano, Quarrata and Campi Bisenzio areas of Tuscany, while schools were closed there, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia and in Veneto, local media reported.
Driven by a powerful jet stream, Storm Ciarán followed severe storms that battered Milan and surrounding areas in the Lombardy region earlier this week, causing widespread damage and Lake Como to overflow.
Storm Ciarán was a “bomb cyclone”, scientists have explained: unusual storms where explosive intensification leads to exceptionally strong winds. It was also unusual in producing both heavy rain and high winds over large areas.
Colin Manning and Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University in the UK said such storms were likely to become more frequent due to the climate crisis. “Alongside drastically cutting emissions, countries must build more resilient infrastructure,” they said.
At least seven people were killed elsewhere in Europe on Thursday, almost all by falling trees, amid winds that reached 124mph (200km/h). Two people died in France, two in Belgium, and one each in the Netherlands, Germany and Spain.
Italy is seen as particularly exposed to the effects of climate breakdown. In May, 14 people died and thousands were left homeless after flooding in Emilia-Romagna.
In Spain, at least 800 people around the coastal town of Gandia in Valencia were evacuated after a wildfire broke out and spread rapidly overnight amid record-breaking winds, officials said on Friday.
• This article was amended on 3 November 2023 to correct the first name of Matteo Biffoni.
