Venice hit by ‘exceptional’ new flooding weeks after being swamped by huge tides that caused €1 BILLION damage – The Sun

VENICE has been hit by "exceptional" new flooding just weeks after high tides caused €1 billion worth of damage.

Waters on Monday morning passed the 1.40m mark for the fifth time this year, bringing parts of the historic city to a standstill.

In November, the waters reached 1.87m, the highest level in more than 50 years, hitting homes and monuments throughout the city.

As well as the €1 billion in damage projected at the time, the city's hoteliers association has said that hotel reservations had fallen 45 percent in some periods since the floods.

This year marks the first in which waters have gone above the "exceptional" 1.40m mark more than twice in one year.

In normal conditions, tides of 80-90 cm are seen as high but manageable.

The increased flooding is being caused partly by climate change and partly by the fact the city is sinking.

'THIS IS A PROLONGED EMERGENCY'

Monday saw a peak of 1.44m and many of the city's landmarks – including the iconic St Mark's Square – once again submerged.

Tourists and locals were pictured wading through the waters carrying luggage and shopping.

Others were seen stubbornly enjoying drinks at outdoor tables while the water lapped around their feet.

Toto Bergamo Rossi, director of the cultural foundation Venetian Heritage, said: “I've been living here for more than 50 years and never seen anything like that.

“It's more than a month now, this is a prolonged emergency.”

Why has Venice been flooding?

St Mark's Square – Venice's centrepiece – now floods more than 60 times annually.

This is up from four times a year in 1900.

Some researchers have warned that Venice will disappear by the year 2100, write oceanography experts Carl Amos and Georg Umgiesser in The Conversation.

They say that the increase in flooding is "due to the combined effects of land subsidence, causing the city to sink, and climate change causing the global sea level to rise."

The city's solution, Moses, an unfinished scheme of 78 storm gates, "is likely to cause damage to the ecological health of the surrounding lagoon, and could have no effect on Venice's preservation".

Venice is built on 118 small islands drained by a network of canals, and located within a tidal lagoon.

Its sea level has risen by a total of 26cm since 1870.

Plus the sea level is still increasing by 2.4mm a year, the experts say, damaging the city's buildings with salt and damp.

They warn: "As a result, with a sea level rise of 50cm, the storm gates will need to close almost daily to protect the city from flooding."

Speaking after the November floods, Mechtild Rössler, director of Unesco's World Heritage Centre, said that Venice would likely lose its status as a World Heritage site if authorities did not act to reduce the impact of flooding.

Vittorio Bonacini, chief of the Association of Venetian Hoteliers, told reporters that events, conferences, and major initiatives planned for next year had had to be cancelled, though urged tourists not to cancel trips to the city.

He said that Venice is more than a metre above sea level, so a tide of 1.44m in fact only means 44cms of water, and that even that only affected certain areas of the old city.

"We have received worried calls from the United States asking us if a child one and a half meter tall could visit without being in danger," he said.

He added that the high tide had only lasted for around 90 minutes before waters began to recede.

The city now welcomes 22 million tourists a year, while only around 55,000 people actually live there, down from 175,000 in 1951.

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