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CIVIL PROTECTION IN ITALY by David Alexander The crash of a light aircraft into Milan’s Pirelli skyscraper in April 2002 briefly trained the spotlight back onto Italy and its civil protection services. They acquitted themselves well in this event, which is just as well, as the Lombardy Regional emergency operations centre is located on the ground floor of the building in question! No other country in Europe has to cope with such a range or magnitude of disasters as Italy does, and hence civil protection is a well-developed and rapidly growing field there. In this brief overview I will first review the nature and scope of disasters in Italy and then report on progress in setting up the country’s emergency service institutions and networks. Over the last three decades of the 20th century disasters in Italy killed an average of 193 people and directly affected more than 75,000 each year. Floods and landslides remain the most widespread events, though earthquakes represent a potentially more devastating threat. Droughts and tornadoes also occur frequently in Italy. Though natural disasters dominate the scene, transportation crashes, industrial accidents and chronic pollution episodes are at least as common as they are in other countries. Civil protection forces have also been active in evacuating areas where newly discovered Second World War bombs have had to be defused, and in helping people stuck in autostrada tailbacks when the summer heatwave coincides with the annual mass migration to holiday destinations. The main risks, however, are as follows. Types of disaster Earthquakes. All of the 8104 municipalities in Italy are classified as seismic. About 40 per cent of the population and 45 per cent of the land area are seriously at risk of earthquakes and between two and five damaging seismic events occur every decade. About 128,000 Italians were killed in earthquakes during the 20th century, and, ominously, no large seismic event has had its epicentre near a major city since 1915. The greatest seismic risks occur in the central south (Campania region), the ‘toe’ of the peninsula (Calabria) and in both eastern and western Sicily. In fact, earthquakes killed 29,500 in Calabria in 1783 and at least 90,000 in the Strait of Messina in 1908. Nowadays, the risk has been reduced by anti-seismic construction regulations and the use of reinforced concrete. Nevertheless, the threat to older buildings remains high: 1200 historic churches were severely damaged in 1997 when the central regions of Umbria and Marche experienced an earthquake swarm that lasted three months. The death of 26 children in the collapse of a school at San Giuliano di Puglia was a particularly sad consequence of a relatively minor earthquake in the central-southern region of Molise in 2002. Volcanic eruptions. Mount Etna in Sicily is Europe’s most active volcano. More than 700,000 people live on its flanks, mostly on top of relatively recent lava flows. Further

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north, although Mount Vesuvius has not erupted since 1944, 650,000 people live on its flanks, one tenth of them in Portici, Europe’s most densely settled municipality where population densities exceed 18,000 persons per square kilometre. In 1631 it was devastated by pyroclastic flows, in which virtually the entire population perished. A further 100,000 people are at risk in the volcanically active Campi Flegrei, west of Naples. Though only subject to small-scale eruptions, the volcanic island of Stromboli produced a damaging tsunami in December 2002. Nearby Vulcano is potentially active and various underwater volcanoes (such as Ferdinandea) in the Tyrrhenian Sea are capable of erupting. Landslides have seriously damaged urban fabrics or infrastructure in 48 per cent of Italian municipalities. More than 3000 landslides cause problems each year and most of them are concentrated in a scarce 20 per cent of the national land area. Of the 3900 landslides mapped in the middle Po valley of Lombardy region, three quarters are on urban land. Floods kill an average of about 40 people a year, although major dam-failure floods have killed many more (1,925 at Vajont in 1963 and 264 at Stava in the Dolomites in 1985). Some 42 per cent of municipalities received damaging floods in the 20th century. About 15,000 flood events were recorded over the period 1918-96, with the highest frequencies in northern and Apennine areas. In the Alps in 1987, a major landslide killed 58 people and dammed the River Adda, impounding 16 million cubic metres of water upstream of the provincial capital city of Sondrio and leading to a major and ultimately successful effort to avoid a gigantic outburst flood. Storms. Hail, lightning and tornado damage can be particularly strong, especially in the summer. In fact, Italy is in fourth place among the countries of the world affected by tornadoes, one of which did major damage in 2002 at Brianza, near Milan. Drought. The summer 2003 drought affected more than half of Italy and reduced the mighty River Po to a mere trickle, such that people could walk across it at Cremona, an unprecedented feat. The shortage of water very nearly forced the country to choose between irrigating crops and generating electricity. To feed the major northern rivers, water levels had to be drawn down in the great sub-Alpine lakes. Other disasters. Italy’s most famous industrial disaster is the dioxin release of 1976 at Séveso, a suburb of Milan, which contaminated several square kilometres of urban land. In another industrial accident, a spectacular petroleum storage tank explosion devastated 2300 homes in Naples in 1986. More recently, 35 people died in the Mont Blanc-Monte Bianco tunnel fire of January 1999. Institutional development With all of this to cope with, the Italian authorities have had to develop strong institutional structures. The first modern national civil protection law was passed in 1970 in the wake of a swarm of 14 earthquakes that occurred in the Belice Valley of western Sicily in 1968, killing 260 people. It institutionalised some of the temporary measures adopted during these events and gave leading responsibility for disaster relief to the fire brigades. At this time, major national disasters were directed by a

Commissar that the government appointed each time they occurred. After the 1980 earthquake in the central south, which left 2735 dead and 8841 injured, this position was turned into a ministerial post. The leading incumbent was the Hon. Giuseppe Zamberletti, later a Senator, whose tireless efforts on behalf of disaster relief and reduction have earned him the unofficial title of the ‘Father of Italian Civil Protection’. In retirement he continues to be highly active as a consultant and much in demand as a speaker at civil protection conferences. Rather curiously, one of the events that have had the greatest impact on the development of civil protection in Italy occurred in 1981 when a small boy, Alfredo Rampino, fell into a well at Vermicino, near Rome, and became wedged in the confined space underground. Frantic though eventually unsuccessful efforts were made to save him and these were broadcast live around the world by television networks. The ground-swell of public sympathy was so strong that it opened a large ‘window of opportunity’ for policy development, and this was adroitly used to divert funding into emergency preparedness for events of considerably larger dimensions than the small human tragedy at Vermicino. The Ministry lasted for eight years until, in 1992 with the passage of a new basic law, it was turned into a department of the Italian State, under the direct control of the cabinet and answering to the Prime Minister through his delegate, the Minister of the Interior. This proved to be the model for the rest of Europe, as it became the pattern mandated by an EU directive. Intensive efforts were then made to spread the business of preparing for disaster to the regions, provinces, prefectures (offices representing the central state in the provinces) and municipalities. This was achieved by offering a standardised emergency management system, the ‘Augustus Method’, so called because Augustus Caesar is reputed to have said that the more complex a problem is, the more simple should be its solution. ‘Augustus’ mandates nine emergency support functions (logistics, communications, transportation, etc.) at the municipal level and 14 at the provincial (coordinating) level. It is now widely adopted and is part of most Italian emergency management software. Devolution Recent years have seen a number of upheavals in the national structure. They began when Italy dispatched large numbers of personnel and volumes of aid to Albania to cope with the influx of Kosovar refugees. The ‘Rainbow Mission’, as it was known, was the first official national humanitarian exercise and a good test of Italy’s emergency forces, which were organised into regional groups (Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Sicily, etc.). It was a resounding success and a great learning exercise for participants, who set up camps for 60,000 refugees. However, it coincided with a time of strong party political polarisation and the then parliamentary opposition turned it into a national scandal on the pretext that resources had been wasted. In the end, none of the accusations was upheld, but the damage was done and the development of the national emergency services abruptly stalled. The momentum abruptly transferred to the regions.

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Another factor that came into play was the vexed question of devolution. A law to decentralise functions of government was passed in 1998 and for civil protection it ushered in a period of struggle between the prefectures, representing the authority of the central state at the province level, and the provincial and regional governments (in Italy 103 provinces are distributed among 20 regions). In August 1999 it appeared that the central state had wrested control from the regions, but since then the matter has been settled by an amendment to the Constitution, which has given the green light to the provincial governments to start planning the coordination of local emergency preparedness efforts. The prefectures have now started collaborating closely with the governments of the provinces they work in. Local response Despite these developments on a national scale, the real pillars on which Italian civil protection rests are the municipalities (comuni) and the voluntary organisations. As in many other countries, so in Italy, when disaster strikes the local mayor is the final authority. Municipalities have been busy setting up emergency offices and developing plans. In some cases they have reached high degrees of sophistication and prominence. The emergency centre for the City of Florence, for example, has a geographic information system that can identify the residences of individual elderly and handicapped people, or the locations of individual fallen trees, and can be used to plan evacuation routes and calculate response times. The emergency planners of Florence proudly boast that they can put 4000 civil protection volunteers into the field at two hours’ notice. It is not an empty claim. The city has a tradition of volunteer emergency services that is unbroken since 1334, when the Venerable Company of the Misericordia was founded. Nowadays, the Misericordia is an up-to-date ambulance service, which runs training courses in urban rescue techniques. It is supplemented by a wide range of similar organizations. Further north, Lombardy, the largest Italian region, which embraces 1537 municipalities, has more than 200 civil protection voluntary units in its register, each of which is incorporated into civil protection forces by a legally valid convention. Field exercises are common at weekends and training courses are in great demand. Winds of change Down in Rome at the national Department of Civil Protection on the banks of the River Tiber there is an air of change and renewal. A painfully protracted process of self-examination has come to an end and bold new initiatives are being planned in detail. These include a national Academy of Civil Protection, which will be housed in the Department's new premises on the Via Salaria. Regions and provinces are busy organizing, not merely plans, but also training courses for public administrators, as indeed they must according to a new national law. Nationally, a healthy debate goes on about the content of the handful of national emergency plan. They include those for the Po valley, eastern Sicily (to combat earthquakes and eruptions of Mount Etna) and the circum-Vesuvian area. These plans are designed to face up to some of the most intractable problems of disaster management. For example, the inhabitants of San Giuseppe, one of the towns on the middle slopes of Vesuvius, have already been evacuated en masse in a major field exercise, but it is a different matter to

evacuate 800,000 (or potentially even three million) people from such a congested area. Fortunately, Vesuvius is just about the most heavily monitored volcano in the world and there are excellent prospects for predicting an eruption. Evacuation will then take place by road, rail and sea, and evacuees will be lodged at designated locations all over the country. Nevertheless, it seems doubtful whether more than four days' advanced warning could be given of the onset of a major eruption, and the amount of time needed to evacuate the entire circum-Vesuvian population is estimated to be two weeks. All things considered, these are exciting times to be involved in civil protection in Italy. Although the field remains only semi-professional and often poorly funded, it is developing with a rapidity, a sophistication and a will to solve problems that are truly refreshing. This is fortunate, as the complexity of modern life demands ever greater organization. In November 1966 the centre of Florence was flooded and 34 people lost their lives. Any future repetition of that great historic flood would involve trying to cope with, for example, the presence of an estimated 10,000 cars in the inner urban area, many more than in 1966. But from Trapani to Trieste the challenges are slowly being met.

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