Andrea Ricci sits exhausted on a dinghy he’s using together with his friends to deliver goods to those living in the flooded district of Lugo, Italy. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
THE floods that submerged the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna last month, killing 15 people, leaving thousands homeless and grinding transportation and businesses to a halt, were not one-off events, warn experts, who predict that there are more similar, frequent and violent storms to come.
“The question to ask,” the country’s civil protection minister, Nello Musumeci, told an Italian newspaper, “is not whether a disastrous event” like the deadly flooding will happen again, “but when and where it will occur”.
The causes of floods are complex, including land development and ground conditions. But many experts in Italy, including Barbara Lastoria, a hydraulic engineer, have linked the two devastating storms that occurred over two weeks to climate change.
The amount of water that fell – almost 500mm of rain in 15 days, more than half the average annual rainfall in the region – was extraordinary, experts say, exacerbated by a months-long drought that had left the terrain struggling to absorb all of that rain. It swelled nearly two dozen rivers and sent billions of gallons of water pouring into streets and untold acres of farmland.
The storms found fertile ground for disaster because of events both natural and human-made, including questionable decisions and decades of neglect of some infrastructure.
“The problem has certainly been underestimated,” said Armando Brath, the president of the Italian Association for Hydrotechniques. “Unfortunately, in Italy, we are not the champions of prevention.”
The solution, some say, may take political will, billions of euros and a populace keenly aware their future may be imperiled.
About 70% of Emilia-Romagna was already at risk of flooding – “a well-known fact,” said Francesco Violo, the president of the National Council of Geologists. And of the 80,000 landslides that have been mapped there, several hundred were reactivated by the recent storms, he added.
The area that flooded is a low-lying flood plain for the Po River. And the widely held view among geologists and hydraulic engineers is that the region’s urbanisation in recent decades not only reduced the space where water could flow but also contributed to the sinking of vast areas where water had been extracted to keep foundations dry.
Rivers were channelled, narrowed, diverted and entombed over generations. Riverbeds and embankments have not been properly maintained; vegetation and animal dens have weakened levees. Many canals, waterways and dams built in past decades – centuries, even – to calm waters flowing down from the Apennine Mountains have been partly neglected.
“Structures to intercept water had been built over many years, and even if many still function, some others have to be fixed up in terms of retrofitting and maintenance so that they can be used again in an optimal configuration,” said Lastoria, who works with the Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research.
In response to the floods, the Italian government set aside €2bil (RM9.94bil) for the flood-stricken area, but Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said the full damage still had to be evaluated and that more funds would go toward reconstruction.
Experts say rebuilding must go hand in hand with preventive measures to at least mitigate the effects of future storms.
But Italy is one of the few countries that have not approved a European Commission directive, the National Adaptation Plan, that obliges all European Union member nations to adopt policies to reduce their vulnerability to climate change.
Musumeci told a senate briefing that the plan would be out at the end of this year or the start of next year, “updated with data processed between 2016 and 2020.” He said the plan “had not made significant progress” for years but that a “major acceleration” would now take place.
There are many departments, regional officers and officials in municipalities responsible for assessing risks and planning countermeasures to disasters. But they are fragmented, said Violol.
“It would be important to create a central office that could ensure a long-term vision, over years, because if ordinary plans aren’t kept up, then emergencies happen,” he said.
Centuries ago, the country began building artificial barriers and dams in many mountainous areas, which make up about 70% of Italian territory, but maintenance was gradually abandoned. The solution to flooding on lower-lying plains starts there, said Mauro Agnoletti, the Unesco Chair on Agricultural Heritage at the University of Florence. Maintenance must be increased, he said, “especially in areas upstream of cities.”
Italians generally do not dwell on the fact that their livelihoods, or their lives, could be at risk from natural calamities – at least not until disaster strikes, experts say.
That indifference puts risk assessment and risk prevention “out of the political agenda,” said Erasmo D’Angelis, the former head of Safe Italy, a government organisation, who evaluated such risks and allocated funds to offset them.
“Major, national public works projects must immediately get on the way in order to ensure the safety of millions of citizens,” he said, “not to mention an enormous industrial and cultural heritage.” — ©2023 The New York Times Company
