Big River

The weather has been pretty ropey for the past few days here in Torino. Yesterday we had lots of rain, and a pretty decent thunderstorm. Today was quite a bit better so we went out for a bike ride up the river.

All that water has to go somewhere, obviously, and the river is probably the highest I’ve seen it. It also seems to be carrying a hell of a lot of debris - tree trunks, plastic bottles, oil drums… so much junk in fact that it has started to collect around any objects in the flow. This bridge for example:

It’s hard to see from my mobile phone picture, but the stuff is forming a dam which stretches about halfway across the river. Here’s a close-up of the dam taken from the bridge:

As the river was so high, on our way back we took a slight diversion to see what the weir in the middle of town was like. They’re in the middle of maintenance work on it at the moment, and have built a small causeway across in order to do the work. With this amount of water in the river all being channelled into half its width by the causeway, we thought it would be pretty impressive.

And it was. Most of the causeway has been swept away; I hope they hadn’t left the pile driver and excavator on it that have been there the past few times I’ve been past…

Lots of murky water pouring over it, you wouldn’t be able to drive a few Minis across just at the minute!