Beyond the mud: the invisible wounds inflicted by floods

“With the mud it’s a losing battle. It wins. It always wins. It becomes like cement and it’s impossible to remove it”. This is Francesca Placci, a young woman from Faenza, speaking about the floods that devastated the Romagna region. The same words could come from the mouth of any other flood victim, because most of the time the fight is with the mud, a mud that never seems to completely go away.

Between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2024, the battle with the mud has been a constant in Romagna. The region has been hit by three floods: on 3 and 16 May 2023 and on 19 September 2024. Not far away, in the Bologna area, the water struck again on 18-19 October 2024. This dramatic sequence is not an isolated event. In the same period there were 32 floods in 17 countries in Europe. This is according to data from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Earth observation programme, which a team of journalists, including facta.eu, collected and analysed.

On 29 October 2024 there was the flood in Valencia, Spain, and the series of floods that hit Germany. Then there were all the others that received less coverage in the Italian media, such as the one that hit Thessaly, Greece, on 5 September 2023 and covered a vast territory with water and mud. Overall, Greece is the European country that has suffered the worst in terms of flooded territory during this period, with over 123,000 hectares affected. Germany and Spain follow, with 107,000 and 54,000 hectares respectively.

Italy comes fourth with about 40,000 hectares affected by flooding, most of which  are in Emilia-Romagna. Faenza, with just under 60,000 inhabitants along the Via Emilia, with its ceramics industries and a fierce sense of pride, soon became a symbol of this phenomenon, which has shaken its “tin bòta” (“stay strong” in the local dialect), an expression of the local spirit of rolled-up sleeves and dogged determination.

Beyond the numbers and data

When this investigation began, it became immediately clear that data would help to provide a more complete picture, showing how flood events everywhere are increasingly common. Data is also what those who administer a territory look at: how many hectares of fields have been flooded? What percentage of the urban area? These are important indicators, which are also used to calculate the damage caused. But they risk overshadowing the personal experience of those who have to face the water and mud, and all of their consequences. Those consequences are of course economic, but also psychological and emotional. For this reason, we chose to collect testimonies from people who live in Faenza.

For ten years Silvia Wakte has been teaching at Artistation, a music school near the Lamone, one of the rivers that overflowed. “The school was completely destroyed, and the fact that it happened at a golden moment made it all the more tragic. You know when you have a dream of becoming something bigger? We were trying to do just that: the founder had just bought the building after 10 years of renting. And it all vanished into thin air.”

After the 2023 flood, their headquarters were rebuilt. Then, one week after the inauguration, the flood of September 2024 brought another wave of devastation. “At that point we all really had to stay psychologically strong, because the owner was on the verge of giving up”, continues an emotional Wakte. “We’re used to a certain level of precariousness, but after so many years, finding ourselves almost back to square one is not easy”. It took a third flood for the administration to finally intervene and provide a temporary location, in a building that could be withdrawn at any moment.

Novella Laghi teaches at a primary school. She lives in a large, old building, the “Mulino dell’isola” (the island mill): a family home for several generations. Laghi and the other people who live in the mill (six families and four artisanal businesses) say they have not received any help. The house is halfway between the countryside and the city. In the countryside the clean-up was faster, thanks to the bulldozers and tools lent by friends and neighbours; and in the city there were those who managed to receive some support. In contrast, “we were completely abandoned”, explains Laghi. “I don’t want to accuse the mayor, because I realise it’s a complex situation, but when he presented the aid plan, my street – via San Martino – wasn’t included”. Laghi had to fix the roof with solar panels, and she bought new doors because the water had washed them away. “I was told that our house was uninhabitable. How could you live like that?”

The psychology of the flood

In addition to material difficulties and expenses, Laghi feels changed by the flood. “I’ve always been an idealist. And because of my role as a teacher, I had a certain amount of faith in the state, and that’s what I always taught at school. Today, however, I feel that I am losing this trust, because I don’t see many avenues for support”.

Institutions seem distant and incapable of responding to the immediate problems of those forced to abandon their homes. “I want to tell my story because I felt completely abandoned”, says Simona Bacchilega, who lives in the historic city centre. “All of us had to fend for ourselves. We received no help whatsoever, except from the volunteers who shovelled the mud with us”. This wasn’t just a problem in the initial phase: “even later on, no one made themselves available. I sent an email to the mayor, who is also my boss since I work for the municipality, but I never received a reply. I feel like I’m harbouring so much resentment, because I would have liked for someone to at least come to me and say: ‘I’m sorry, I’d like to help you but I can’t. How are you, though?’, Instead, nothing. With the distance and perceived remoteness of the institutions, we requested some intervention from the mayor of Faenza, but we received no response.”

Laghi and Bacchilega voice a common reaction among those who suffer traumas of this kind. Raffaela Paladini, a psychologist specialising in emergency psychology, explains that “it’s not just the thread of everyday life that is disrupted, but also the internal order of things. Our principles and our scale of values can change, and in this sense the risk is that a completely different form of thinking, or psycho-social outlook, is established”.

Moreover, the fact that in many cases aid arrives late, or not at all, also causes a rupture within the social fabric. “The people of Romagna have been very good at leveraging their resilience,” continues the psychologist. “There was no lack of help from volunteers and civic organisations, but trauma, by its very nature, tends to create isolation, because people experience many emotions: from anger, to guilt and shame. If, on top of that, the institutions are absent, there is a risk that an individualistic tendency will develop and everyone will just look out for themselves”.

Water, mud and human relationships

“Can you imagine what it means to find yourself with not even a shirt on your back? All I had was a pair of underwear,” Mire Emiliani exclaims. She still hasn’t been able to return to her house. “I live day by day now, but I wasn’t like this before. Since the water arrived, I’ve been seeing a psychologist from the local health authority. But the meetings aren’t enough and they’ll finish in August. I don’t know how I’ll be in the next few years”. Emiliani lived in a rented house in the centre of town, in via Lapi, which in Faenza is called “Lower Italy” because it’s below the river level. After the flood, she spent a month in a strangers’ house, and was then moved to a hotel. Il Cavallino. “About a hundred people of all ages and from all walks of life were staying at the Cavallino. Honestly, I would have expected more cooperation, but instead everyone was just looking out for themselves. There was never a smile or any drive to support each other,” Emiliani concludes.

Silvia Wakte also noticed the effect of the water on interpersonal relationships. “In the school where I work, there has always been a very relaxed atmosphere among my colleagues, but things have changed since the flood”, she says. “Some people have left and others have been dismissed. We still carry the aftermath with us. We often talk about it. In these situations there is a great sense of frustration, everyone’s faults are magnified and you end up arguing all the time, even over trivial things”.

This is why the role of professionals is crucial. As Raffaela Paladini says, “those who deal with emergency psychology work on the connections within the social fabric and on sharing, because this creates alliances, well-being and solidarity”. And yet, although they are not a representative sample, only two of the people we met had turned to a psychologist: Emiliani and M., a girl who is now 7 years old.

“She wasn’t at home the night of the flood because she was at my mother-in-law’s house”, says her mother, Francesca Placci, choking back her emotion. “We spent 15 days without seeing her because we couldn’t move, and then she returned. Imagine a 5-year-old girl leaving the house with her bedroom all in order and returning to nothing. From that moment on, the questions started: “You could have died and I would have been left alone?” At that point she collapsed. And just a year later the September flood came and further complicated things. It was difficult for me too. For the first time in my life, I suffered from panic attacks and sleeping became impossible”.

Endless expenses

One of the main problems is the expenses, which are often unaffordable. Francesca Placci, for example, had to change jobs to increase her income: “I used to work part-time as a cook in a canteen. But I had to leave. Today I work in a “piadineria” (a restaurant specialising in piadina, a typical Italian flatbread) six days a week, seven hours a day”. Her family incurred damages amounting to 137,000 euro. Of that total, 96,000 euro were received through the reimbursement platform set up by the Region, but the first half only arrived at the beginning of the year.

The same goes for Andrea Bazzocchi, a banker from Faenza who had to live with his wife and son in a one-room apartment in another town for a year and a half, sleeping three to a double bed. Bazzocchi obtained compensation of about 40,000 euro for structural damage, as well as a one-off, insufficient contribution for furniture. “We spent 20,000 euro on furniture, but over 20 years we had accumulated many things, the things that make a house your home. Now we have to buy everything again, but we no longer have 20 years to rebuild our nest”.

Fears for themselves and their loved ones, human relationships that have become more complicated, antipathy towards institutions, and a house that is no longer the one built with their own memories: manifestations of a metaphorical mud that sticks to those who suffered the flood, and will be extremely difficult to remove, in Faenza, in Valencia, in Thessaly. Beyond the need to rebuild the embankments, repair the roads and make the houses habitable again, the flood has also deeply impacted other aspects of society and revealed something that is not in any database: “after the water”, as some call the floods, something has changed within people and in society, and this will likely have long-term consequences, after the media spotlight has faded.