With millions of cubic meters of timber still on the ground, and summer approaching, authorities and environmentalists in northern Italy were engaged in a race against time. Over six months have past since a storm called "Vaia" hit four northern regions with unusually warm winds exceeding 150 km per hour and strong rainfalls.

It was Oct. 29, and the event resulted in an unprecedented damage to forests in northeast Trentino, Friuli, and Veneto, and northwest Lombardy regions, which provide two thirds of all Italian timber.

No single event of extreme weather had ever caused such extensive destruction to Italian forests, and the reaction it triggered appeared, in its own way, unprecedented as well.