The bad weather, with violent thunderstorms accompanied by hail, hit the Peninsula in spots with incalculable damage to crops from fruit to vegetables, but also beets, sunflowers, barley and wheat to olive trees and Chianti vineyards. This is what emerges from Coldiretti monitoring, which has mapped the effects of the violent disturbance that hit from north to south of the Peninsula, from Piedmont to Lombardy, from Veneto to Emilia Romagna to Tuscany, but the alert is extended also from Campania to Sardinia. If the rain was expected after a long drought to restore water supplies in lakes, rivers and soils, the heavy storms, especially where accompanied by hail, have caused irreparable damage to crops but also landslides and mudslides as dry soils are unable to absorb the violently falling water. Falling hail in the countryside is the most damaging at this stage of the season because of the irreversible losses it causes to crops in the fields just on the eve of the harvest, sending an entire year's work up in smoke. It is an adverse climatic event that is repeated with increasing frequency, but also changing is the size of the grains, which turns out to have increased considerably in recent years with the fall of real blocks of ice, even larger than a tennis ball. The strong disturbance in Tuscany did not spare the Chianti area, between Panzano and Greve, where the roots of the vines in Florentine Chianti were covered by a boundless blanket of hailstones, as, moreover, happened with fruit trees and expanses of vegetables. In the Grosseto area, the flooding torrent swept away everything it encountered, taking away not only the tomato, salad and zucchini plants but also the irrigation system.
|