Landslide in Ischia, Italia Nostra: it’s time to choose safety

1,300,000 Italian citizens live in areas at risk of landslides and many more at risk of flooding. Casamicciola, cyclically hit by earthquakes and landslides, is once again overwhelmed by mud and debris and Piazza Anna De Felice, thus renamed in memory of the fifteen-year-old victim of the 2009 landslide, is today a place of destruction and pain, while the count of victims rises exponentially compared to then.

It’s time to choose security. It is time to tell the citizens who live in the most dramatically fragile areas of the territory that their homes must be relocated and that it will never be possible to build in areas at risk again. It’s time to monitor the territory to counter the illegal phenomenon, intervening promptly with demolitions. It is time to make territorial planning and management effective and restore the violated legality because security is not negotiable. It’s time to say that there is no “necessary” illegal activity but, if anything, the need to find common-sense solutions to well-known problems that have never, guiltily, been addressed.

It is also time to remind local administrators that failing to examine the thousands of requests for amnesty means putting the lives of their fellow citizens at risk. As well as reminding the Region that, according to the laws in force, it has the power to replace the defaulting Municipalities both in territorial planning and in closing the age-old plague of requests for amnesty, and in intervening on the present illegality. In the same way, the Regional Basin Authority cannot opt ​​out of seeking a solution to the problem of amnesties.