Flood risk, six years to complete a work

Never was slow more appropriate: "Chentu concas, chentu berrittas". A hundred heads and a hundred caps for a disaster punctuated by a babel of projects, hundreds of millions of euros untouched, without a euro spent, and with infinite biblical planning and construction times. Other than urgency-emergency, the hydrogeological risk in Sardinia is by now a mammoth factory of paperwork, of procedures capable of screwing one with the other, with decision-making and expenditure centers that contend with delays and chaos.

Great pomp

Announcements with great pomp for new millionaire allocations have been going on for years, with the "brand" of the disaster making the news regardless, from Olbia to Bitti, passing through Capoterra and Assemini. Yet entering the "system" of hydrogeological risk in Sardinia, planning and governing the territory, means venturing into a real labyrinth, where there is no way out. The databases, if you want to define them that way, are a mass of procedures, allocations and times that are badly intertwined between the most disparate subjects, from the Extraordinary Commissioner for the implementation of hydrogeological risk mitigation interventions, in this case the President of the Region, up to the contracting stations scattered in every corner of the island.

Sovereign chaos

To discover that chaos reigns supreme, you don't need an innate critical sense, just read the latest internal report of the regional administration, the one put on paper by the evaluation and verification nucleus of public investments of the Regional Programming Center, a sort of NASA region in terms of public spending. A lucid and irreverent dossier, which goes to the point of managing the funds intended to prevent and mitigate the great flood risk that has devastated Sardinia from north to south. A no-frills examination which constitutes the most evident proof of the bureaucratic "disaster" of hydrogeological risk management.

Monitoring in the dark

The managers of the Planning center use the tact of public officials and the ax of those who have to tell the truth: «Even today, at the regional level there is no single and systematically updated information framework of the planned works and of the resources committed and spent in field of soil conservation. If the beating heart of regional programming says so, even today without a guide, it is to be believed.

The Sardinian case

On the Internal Monitoring and Control System of the Sardinian Region, the SMEC, the managers in charge of examining procedures and expenditure on projects relating to the prevention of hydrogeological risk write: «Compared to other databases that cross-reference data already entered in other systems, the SMEC, the Monitoring system of the Region, would represent for the implementing bodies a fulfillment not only onerous in terms of time, but also of complicated execution because the configuration of the system is "blocking", but at the same time it is not able to represent all the aspects of complexity of the long process of planning, designing and implementing the interventions».

Tamp the water

«An excessively "articulated and cumbersome" system, as the SMEC has been defined, (it has been said "it seems that the purpose of what is being done has been lost") in the end is a disincentive» – is written in the document. As if to say "you step on water", without an end and without a reason. The result is in the numbers of public expenditure for hydrogeological risk works, not cycle paths, but strategic interventions capable of saving human lives and avoiding new disasters.

“buried” channels

It is enough to read the data of the report on the buried canals scattered far and wide across Sardinia to understand what is happening: «Looking at the progress of the projects financed for the buried canals - it is written in the regional dossier - a strong expense data issues. As of 31 January 2021, (last check available ed.), in fact, according to the information uploaded to the regional monitoring system, of the 23 projects planned, around a third (8 projects) recorded commitments exceeding 70% of the admitted cost, while for all the others commitments did not reach 20% (12 projects) or even nothing was committed (3 projects).'

The primacy of delay

It gets worse. On the timing of all hydrogeological interventions, according to the internal evaluation nucleus in viale Trento, «the Sardinia region, on an analysis conducted on 77 lots, which are "completed" as at 31 December 2019, shows an average total duration of 5.9 years, against the national average of 4.8».

Bitti & Olbia, zero

A truly unenviable record if we consider that most of the most important projects, those concerning the areas most affected by the most catastrophic floods, in order of time, Olbia and Bitti, are at a standstill, i.e. construction sites that have never started. For Olbia, after the flood of November 18, 2013, 125 million have been allocated, the Roman monitoring shows flat expenditure encephalogram. The regional governance, amid clashes and controversies, has not managed to spend even a single euro. In Bitti, a double tragedy, 2013 and 2020, there are a good 70 million euros of appropriations, also in this case zero expenditure. With the country always in the balance, between proclamations and strategic construction sites that have never begun. One designs everywhere, with a slow pace, with biblical times hoping for the mercy of the weather, the meteorological one.