Il 14 November of the 1951 the Po broke its banks causing the Polesine flood, a region which roughly corresponds to the province of Rovigo. It was one of the worst natural disasters in Italian history: about one hundred people lost their lives and another 180 were left homeless. In the two weeks preceding the calamity, the river had swollen unusually due to particularly intense and prolonged rainfall, which had also caused all the tributaries to flood.
“In five days, from 8 to 12 November 1951, about 17 billion cubic meters of water, equal to the amount that usually falls in six months - write Mihran Tchaprassian and Paolo Sorcinelli in the book The flood: Polesine and Italy in 1951 (Metauro, 2014) – To this already considerable mass of water was added the abundant rainfall that had hit the same area in August and the previous October, and which had reduced the soil's absorption capacity to a minimum”.
And so, in the night between 14 and 15 November 70 years ago, the flood broke the banks at Occhiobello and about eight billion cubic meters of water (more than the entire Lake Geneva) flooded the Polesine, flooding a million hectares of land. The height of the water averaged two meters, but in some places it went as high as 5-6 meters.
Television was not yet a widespread object in Italian homes, but the front pages of newspapers and newsreel footage showed the country terrible and unforgettable images: families on the roofs of houses, cats and dogs on trees, the carcasses of animals taken away from the current. The arrival of President Einaudi. And then again firefighters, policemen, carabinieri and volunteers engaged in a gigantic operation to rescue and consolidate the embankments.
It was the most serious flood of the Po of all time and for Italy it represented the first national tragedy after the Second World War. That it had ended, with a civil war, just six years before.
