CIVIL PROTECTION IN ITALY

by David Alexander

The crash of a light aircraft into Milans 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 countrys 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 Europes most active volcano. More than
700,000 people live on its flanks, mostly on top of relatively recent lava flows. Further

north, although Mount Vesuvius has not erupted since 1944, 650,000 people live on
its flanks, one tenth of them in Portici, Europes 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. Italys most famous industrial disaster is the dioxin release of 1976
at Sveso, 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
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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 Italys
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.

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
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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.