THE SEARCH was still ongoing last night for the body of Waterford man Vincent Wall (27), believed to have drowned in the river Tiber in Rome on Friday night.
Mr Wall, who was in Rome to attend a friend's wedding, is believed to have lost his balance and fallen into the Tiber at about 3am on Saturday morning.
It seems Mr Wall and a friend, David McGrath, after a night out on the town, opted to have a close look at the Tiber, currently swollen and at its highest level for 40 years following days of heavy rain in the Rome area.
The pair stopped to look at the river from the Ponte Principe Amedeo bridge, close to the Vatican.
Media reports suggest that to get a closer look at the river, the two men walked down the steps that lead from the bridge down to the riverside embankment. It was at this point that Mr Wall apparently lost his balance, falling into the fast-flowing river.
Some reports suggested that he had been attempting to take a picture of the river with his mobile phone, leaning over the embankment parapet with the aid of a tree branch when the branch snapped.
At first Mr McGrath was unaware as to what had happened to his friend and it was only after some moments that he looked down into the river and saw Mr Wall in the river desperately clinging to a piece of driftwood.
At this point, Mr McGrath sounded the alarm, shouting to a group of traffic police, one of many such groups on standby duty on Friday night to deal with any emergencies caused by the Tiber breaking its banks.
"One of the coast guard men, who was on duty at Ponte Mazzini, threw a rubber ring at him but unfortunately, the young Irish man was so panicked that he was not able to catch it," Guido Bortolaso, head of the Protezione Civile, the civil protection emergency services, told the Rome daily Il Tempo.
Mr Wall was swept along all the way down to the next bridge, Ponte Mazzini, still clinging to the driftwood.
At this point, however, rescue workers lost sight of him in the darkness. His friend was subsequently taken to the Santo Spirito hospital where he was treated for shock.
Mr Wall was the second person feared drowned in the flooding. On Friday morning, a woman on her way to work drowned when her car became stuck in a flooded underpass in the Rome suburb of Monterotondo.
Last night emergency workers remained on high alert as the rain, which had granted a temporary reprieve yesterday afternoon, started up again, once more prompting fears that the Tiber might flood downtown Rome.