Climate change and illegal building blamed after deadly mudslide
The Italian resort island of Ischia has a long history of natural disasters, but experts say a weekend landslide that killed eight people and left five missing was exacerbated by a combination of climate change and oftenillegal excessive development.
Search teams digging through metres of mud and debris recovered the eighth victim yesterday, identified by the Naples prefect as a 15-year-old boy whose younger siblings were confirmed dead over the weekend.
Victims include a three-week-old infant, who was named Giovangiuseppe after the island’s patron saint, and his parents.
Exceptionally heavy rain caused a chunk of Mount Epomeo to come crashing down before dawn on Sunday, gaining speed as it entered the populated port town of Casamicciola, where it demolished buildings and carried cars and buses into the sea. About 30 houses were inundated by the mud and water, and more than 200 residents in the town of 8300 remain homeless, officials say.
Authorities yesterday freed a small dog that had been trapped inside an overturned vehicle since Sunday. The whereabouts of the dog’s owners were not known.
Environmental experts and geologists have pointed to a pattern of construction that interferes with natural water runoffs, as well as a prevalence of illegal buildings on the mountainous island of volcanic origin just off Naples.
“In Ischia there was an extreme event, very strong rain, the result of climate change, on an island that has become a symbol of illegal construction,” said Stefano Ciafani, president of the environmental group
Legambiente. He cited 27,000 requests to regularise unapproved buildings on the island in a series of amnesties since 1985, representing about half of all Ischia’s buildings. While many requests are still pending, about 600 of the structures have been ordered demolished. But Ciafani said a third of all ordered demolitions are ever carried out in Italy.
In Casamicciola, the requests for amnesties number 3506. Like many on the island, the illegally built structures are primarily for vacation homes, Ciafani noted, not primary residences that fell under the scope of the 1985 amnesty.
The World Wildlife Foundation blamed “inertia and the tolerance of the public administration, if not governments”, for the failure to confront the issue of illegal construction.
The organisation called for a speedy law to stop new construction and prevent more land from being covered by concrete and buildings.
Casamicciola itself has become synonymous with natural disasters. Two other landslides, in 2006 and 2009, claimed five lives, and a relatively minor 4.0-magnitude quake in 2017 killed two people.