Rome is sinking
Rome wasn’t built in a day but these days it feels as if it may collapse in one, writes Tobias Jones, of The Observer.
SINKHOLES are opening up in Rome — to the tune of 44 already this year.
Every few days, a new crater appears and authorities are struggling to keep up with the destruction. Wild weather is a factor, and climate change is also affecting other parts of Italy.
BLAME the rain, the Government or just geology, but extreme weather events are on the rise in Italy.
So far this year, Rome has suffered an astonishing 44 sinkholes. Every two or three days, a new crater appears in the Italian capital’s asphalt.
They are normally the size of a small room, a few metres wide and a few metres deep. In February, though, six cars were sucked down into the bowels of the earth when 50m of via Livio Andronico fell away, causing entire buildings to be evacuated.
It is not a new phenomenon: there have been an average of 90 sinkholes a year in Rome since 2010. In 2013, there were 104 and 2018 will surely surpass even that record.
The problem is clearly getting worse: the streets are beginning to look like black emmenthal and everyone in Italy is wondering why the earth seems, in the words of the Jewish prophet Isaiah, ‘‘to stagger like a drunken man’’.
Some blame the rain.
Romans are used to wearing sunglasses all winter, but this has been the wettest six months in living memory. There have been plenty of what are melodramatically called bombe d’acqua (water bombs).
In September last year, flooded subways were closed as rivers cascaded down the escalators and stations became huge shower rooms with water gushing through ceiling cracks. Thousands of cars were in water up to their wing mirrors.
In November — and this is a sure sign things are serious — Lazio’s football match against Udinese was postponed due to torrential rain. The week before last, there was more flooding of the subway. In the past month, central Italy has had 141% more ‘‘anomalous rainfall’’ than average.
Rain is a problem because of the city’s geology. Much of Rome is built on unconsolidated sediments, like the floodplain of the River Tiber. That means water washes away small deposits that give the ground additional rigidity.
Soft soil also amplifies not just earthquake tremors (hence the missing south side of the Colosseum) but also the vibrations of the city’s incessant traffic, causing what the president of Lazio’s guild of geologists calls ‘‘the liquefaction of the ground’’.
It is like shaking a sieve full of water and clay below the asphalt: soon enough, the water will whisk away the grit and you will be left with a jellylike blob to support the heavy traffic.
Additional water comes not from the skies but from the creaking subterranean infrastructure. Ancient aqueducts, such as the Vergine one that supplies the Trevi fountain, are still in use. Because of leaks, 50% of water is lost between the Lazio region’s freshwater lakes and Romans’ taps.
Many of the city’s sewers are so old they are made of cracked brick and tiles. And the fact there are 32sq km of tunnels, cavities, catacombs and quarries beneath the surface of the city hardly helps.
In many ways, the city council has exacerbated the problem: it is perennially corrupt and chronically incompetent. Last December, it was unable even to buy a green evergreen for Christmas. The tendering process for road repairs and reconstruction has been dragging on for years, because Roman bureaucracy is like treacle. And when a contract is finally awarded, companies often cut corners, patching roads badly because that way there will be more work in future.
Meanwhile, the city council deals with 4000 insurance claims a year, mainly regarding vehicle damage and broken bones due to falls.
Romans deal with the setbacks with characteristic humour. They will laughingly tell you that Honda moved its suspension research centre to Rome because the city has the worst roads in the world.
The brownneedled Christmas tree they nicknamed spelacchio (‘‘the mangy thing’’) and a recent cartoon suggested that at least the sinkholes might be able to halt the progress of Lionel Messi and his mates from the visiting Barcelona football team (as it was, Roma won anyway).
But the sinkholes are a serious reminder that extreme weather and procedural incompetence can be a fatal combination. Last month, a former mayor of Genoa, Marta Vincenzi, was sentenced to five years in prison for failing to take the necessary safety measures during the 2011 floods in which four women and two children lost their lives.
In January last year, 29 people died when intense snowfall coupled with earthquake tremors caused an avalanche that obliterated a hotel in Rigopiano, in Abruzzo. Warnings had been ignored and the rescue effort was so slow that one eventual victim appears to have survived for 40 hours under the snow.
It may be unfair to blame emergency services or politicians for those fatalities. As one ironic Italian saying goes, parodying the habit of blaming of politicians for everything: ‘‘It’s raining: thieving government.’’
But what is clear from Rome’s craters and torrential rains is that events that used to seem extraordinary are now normal. Last September, in Livorno, 256mm of rain fell in one night, more than in the previous eight months, and eight people lost their lives in the resulting floods. Thirtyseven people died in floods in Messina in 2009; 13 in Liguria two years later; 18 in Sardinia in 2013.
In a month in which Le Marche has again been subjected to repeated earthquakes, one gets the sense that the soil in Italy is simply less solid beneath one’s feet.
It is not only due to seismic activity (although earthquakes have claimed 669 victims in the past 10 years), it is also down to topography: steep and sodden mountains, like the Roman asphalt, occasionally give in to gravity, taking roads and houses with them. And in an era of ever more extreme weather, it is unlikely the earth is going to sober up just yet. — Guardian News and Media