A person is dead and a dozen people remain missing after a landslide, which occurred on the island off the coast of Naples on Saturday.
MO12345LEMONDE with AFP
The Italian government proclaimed, Sunday, November 27, the state of emergency on the island of Ischia, in the bay of Naples, touched the day before by a landslide which left a dead and a dozen missing. An emergency envelope of 2 million euros was also unlocked after an extraordinary government meeting, necessary to proclaim the state of emergency, said the Minister of Civil Protection, Nello Musumeci.
The state of emergency is often decreed in the peninsula, following earthquakes, volcanic rashes or high weather, because it provides for an accelerated procedure to mobilize funds and means, including those of protection civil, for urgent interventions or the implementation of reception structures.
Casamicciola term, a thermal station of 8,000 inhabitants in winter on the island of Ischia, had undergone in 2017 an earthquake which had left two dead. It had been completely destroyed by a much more powerful earthquake at the end of the 19th e century.
shovelful ballet
On site, more than two hundred members of civil protection and the police are still looking for ten missing, while hundreds of volunteers, mud to the knees, are busy cleaning up The streets of the small town. Remains of cars and buses crushed by the mudslide are visible all over a ballet of shovelers who try to release access to houses, cars and stores.
“It’s a situation that hurts us, if only for people who disappeared under the mountain. Here, it’s an island and even if you don’t really know each other, it’s almost that , at least sight, “said a resident of Ischia, where he was born forty-five years ago. “The mountain came down, there was a devastation of shops, cars, hotels and it had already happened nine years ago. Now, I’m cleaning my mother-in-law’s store” , he explained.
This shift was caused by the lack of maintenance and prevention, “because nature is nature, there has been the earthquake, but a little prevention” may have saved lives, according to M . Lorini, who would like to set up a system similar to that of the buoys warning of the arrival of a tsunami, and allowing to say when the earth moves.