Italy wildfires encircle Palermo as temperatures hit 47C

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Wildfires driven by an extreme heatwave have encircled Palermo after temperatures in the Sicilian city climbed to 47C (117F) on Monday.

Local authorities closed the airport temporarily and part of the motorway as more than 55 wildfires were reported on the island. Hundreds of firefighters from other regions in Italy were due to arrive to help battle the flames.

An 88-year-old woman was reported to have died in San Martino delle Scale, a few miles from the Sicilian capital, after disruption caused by the fires prevented emergency services from reaching her in time.

“We have never seen anything like it,” a San Martino delle Scale resident told Italy’s Ansa news agency. “We were surrounded by fire. We could not go anywhere. We spent the night in the square. These were terrible moments.”

More than 120 families have been evacuated from their homes in Mondello, Capo Gallo and Poggio Ridente since Monday, as clouds of smoke advanced towards the city centre and the sirens of fire engines and ambulances resounded across the Sicilian capital.

Temperatures in Palermo soared on Monday, breaking the previous record for the city of 44.8C set in 1999. The National Institute for Astrophysics said 47C was recorded at its digital weather station at the top the medieval Palazzo dei Normanni at 3.42pm local time.

Hospitals across the city have reported a sharp rise in the number of people seeking emergency care for heat-related illnesses.

In the east Sicilian city of Catania, temperatures were close to 47C and people were struggling with power cuts and problems with the water supply.

The European record of 48.8C was registered in Floridia, Sicily, in August 2021. Temperatures are high across southern Italy and forecast to remain so before a drop on Wednesday.

A 50-year-old man from Tunisia working on a farm near Viterbo, north of Rome, on Monday became the fifth worker to die of heatwave-related causes in Italy over the past two weeks, the trade union CGIL said.

But while the heat stifles the south, northern regions continued to bear the brunt of bad weather caused by the arrival of cooler air from northern Europe, with more torrential rain and gales forecast in Lombardy, Trentino Alto Adige, Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia.

On Monday, bad weather felled trees and blocked the metro in Milan, and the northern Italian rail company Trenord said its network had experienced widespread damage and breakdowns.

In the province of Brescia, a teenage girl died after being struck by a tree. The 16-year-old was killed during a camping trip in Cedelogo after the storm caused a tree at the site to collapse on to her tent.

Lombardy’s fire service received hundreds of calls from residents as strong winds ripped the roofs of several homes.

Giuseppe Sala, the mayor of Milan, said residents endured a sleepless night as winds exceeded 63 mph (100 km/h).

The overnight storms followed extreme weather, during which huge hailstones damaged the nose and wings of a Delta Air Lines plane that had been bound for New York, forcing it to divert to Rome Fiumicino.

Sala said: “What we are seeing is not normal. We can no longer deny that climate change is changing our lives. We can no longer turn a blind eye, and above all, we can’t not do anything.”

The climate crisis is supercharging extreme weather across the world, leading to more frequent and more deadly disasters from heatwaves to floods to wildfires.

The civil protection minister, Nello Musumeci, said: “Climate change is not just a contingency and Italy must realise that it now has a tropical climate.

“On one hand, we are paying the price of climate change, for which we should have paid more attention several years ago, and, on the other, of infrastructure that does not seem to be totally adequate for the new context.”