For the moment , the death toll confirmed in Ischia has stopped at eight after a mudslide caused by the heavy rains of the night overwhelmed the town of Casamicciola on Saturday .

This morning the area where Gianluca Monti and his wife Valentina, the parents of the three brothers (aged 15, 11 and 6) who had already been found dead, could be found.

However, the Monti spouses have not yet been recovered, just as two other people remain missing : it is not an easy job for the rescuers, about 160 firefighters with 70 vehicles from Campania, Lazio, Tuscany, Abruzzo, Puglia, Molise. The remains of cars and buses crushed by the violent landslide and landslide are everywhere, while the shovels are still trying to free up access to houses, cars and shops. The divers operate with a sonar to scan the seabed in the stretch of sea near the port.

IGNORED PECs - Territorial fragility, climate change, extreme weather events, poor maintenance and illegal building are the mix of causes that caused the tragedy. The former mayor of Casamicciola, the engineer Giuseppe Conte, had spoken about it on November 22 to the prefect of Naples , the prefectural commissioner of Casamicciola, the mayor of Naples, Gaetano Manfredi and the civil protection of Campania. He had done so with some certified emails, in which he had invited the authorities to evacuate the population due to the risks that the expected abundant rainfall could cause, to which no one would ever respond . Unheeded alarms investigated by the Naples prosecutor's office.

« Unfortunately, the risk of these phenomena in the Ischia area is very high - says Lorenzo Benedetto, president of the Study Center of the National Council of Geologists today - the last event in chronological order occurred in 2009, and the data of the 2021 Ispra report indicate for Casamicciola that around 60% of the territory and 30% of the population are exposed to a high risk».

Not only building amnesties, in Italy in the last 50 years almost 1 out of 3 agricultural land has disappeared (-30%) due to abandonment and overbuilding. The consequence? The reduction of the rain absorption capacity with all the related consequences. According to Ispra, 8.7% of the Italian territory is at high or very high risk of landslides and 10% is located in areas with a high hydraulic risk . Which means that over 1.3 million Italians live in unsafe areas.

(Unioneonline/D)

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