Venice could use a bailout. The city built on water has too much of it.
Residents and tourists waded through knee-deep water on Monday as they navigated the city’s narrow streets and alleys and its historic St. Mark’s Square was inundated. Boxes of tourist merchandise floated inside the flooded shops around the square and even the city’s famed pigeons sought refuge on rooftops and windowsills.
One of the highest tides in its history brought Venice to a virtual halt, rekindling a debate over a plan to build moveable flood barriers in an effort to save the lagoon city from high tides.
PHOTO: AP
City officials said the tide peaked at 156cm, well past the 110cm flood mark, as strong winds pushed the sea into the city.
Alarms went off at 6:37am to alert citizens, but many residents were taken by surprise because authorities had initially not forecast such a high water level.
In St. Mark’s Square, one of the city’s lowest points, tourists tried to stay dry by hopping on cafe tables and chairs sticking out of the water. The water was so high that someone rowed a small speedboat across the wide square.
“It was quite an extraordinary experience,” said Michel Gorski, visiting from Brussels with his wife. “We got stuck in the hotel for half a day but we didn’t suffer. We were sorry for the restaurants and stores around, but there was no panic and everyone worked really hard to clean up quickly.”
Workers were unable to install the traditional raised wooden walkways used during flooding because the water rose so high the platforms would have floated away too.
It was the fourth-highest tide since 1872, when the city started keeping records. The last time Venice saw such high waters was in 1986, while the all-time record was 194cm in 1966.
That flood forced 3,000 people to evacuate and damaged many historic buildings, but largely spared the city’s art — which had long ago been removed to upper floors because of flooding by tides.
Giancarlo Galan, the conservative governor of the surrounding Veneto region, criticized Venice’s center-left administration for failing to prepare for the flood and for allegedly stonewalling a long-planned system of barriers that would rise from the seabed to ease the effect of high tides.
The US$5.5 billion project, called “Moses” after the Biblical figure who parted the Red Sea, has been under construction for years and is expected to be completed by 2011. The company building the barriers said that had the system been in place, the city would not have been flooded on Monday.
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war in the latest such swap that saw the release of hundreds of captives and was brokered with the help of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that 189 Ukrainian prisoners, including military personnel, border guards and national guards — along with two civilians — were freed. He thanked the UAE for helping negotiate the exchange. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that 150 Russian troops were freed from captivity as part of the exchange in which each side released 150 people. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers
The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland on Tuesday expressed concern about “the political crisis” in Georgia, two days after Mikheil Kavelashvili was formally inaugurated as president of the South Caucasus nation, cementing the ruling party’s grip in what the opposition calls a blow to the country’s EU aspirations and a victory for former imperial ruler Russia. “We strongly condemn last week’s violence against peaceful protesters, media and opposition leaders, and recall Georgian authorities’ responsibility to respect human rights and protect fundamental freedoms, including the freedom to assembly and media freedom,” the three ministers wrote in a joint statement. In reaction
BARRIER BLAME: An aviation expert questioned the location of a solid wall past the end of the runway, saying that it was ‘very bad luck for this particular airplane’ A team of US investigators, including representatives from Boeing, on Tuesday examined the site of a plane crash that killed 179 people in South Korea, while authorities were conducting safety inspections on all Boeing 737-800 aircraft operated by the country’s airlines. All but two of the 181 people aboard the Boeing 737-800 operated by South Korean budget airline Jeju Air died in Sunday’s crash. Video showed the aircraft, without its landing gear deployed, crash-landed on its belly and overshoot a runaway at Muan International Airport before it slammed into a barrier and burst into flames. The plane was seen having engine trouble.
RSS