At least six people were killed as torrential rain battered southern Italy overnight, demolishing a bridge, sweeping away cars and derailing a Eurostar train, police said on Sunday, according to Reuters. Three members of a family were killed as their car plunged into a ravine when a bridge collapsed near Bari, the capital of the Apulia region, and two men drowned near the city when their cars were swept away by floods of water and mud. Italian civil defence chief Guido Bertolaso, who immediately flew to Bari from Rome, described the deluge as an "exceptional climatic event which can only happen once in a hundred years." "In just three hours in a limited area last night we had 161 millimetres (6.3 inches) of rain -- as much as the Apulia region gets in a whole year," he told reporters. Early on Sunday, around 20 passengers were injured when six carriages of a Taranto to Milan Eurostar train were derailed near Bari after a landslide swept away the earth beneath the rail tracks, leaving one carriage overhanging a chasm. The storms also caused one death near Catania, in Sicily, where rescuers on Sunday recovered the body of a hunter who was listed as missing late on Saturday after raging flood waters swept away his car. The family members who died when the bridge near Bari collapsed were Mario Lobefaro, 52, his daughter Francesca, 19, and son Nicola, 28, police said. Fire service divers were still searching for Mario's wife Angela, 49, and son Michele, 23, who had also been in the car. But a 14-year-old boy and a male relative survived, resisting the force of the flood waters by hanging on to a wall. The seven were returning from a birthday party. Civil defence officials said many roads, houses and factories in the Bari and Taranto area had been flooded. Fields of vegetables and olive trees were completely submerged but officials said it was too soon to put a value on the damage.
