The water crisis in the Basilicata region of southern Italy has been going on for months. In a longer article for the Italian daily La Repubblica, Anna Martino writes about recent decisions and gives background:
The water of Italy’s Basento river is safe to drink. This was the conclusion reached by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Potenza, which asked the Carabinieri to take samples and have them analysed by a third party, not by the regional authorities. The tests, according to the judicial authorities, “showed that the samples complied with the provisions of Legislative Decree No. 18 of 23 February 2023 on the quality of water intended for urban consumption, so that the sample tested was within the drinking water parameters”. This confirms the results of the tests already carried out by Arpab and Arpa Puglia, to which the Region of Basilicata finally turned. One chapter seems to be closed, but another is opening. “In addition to future samplings – the public prosecutor’s office announced – further investigations are being carried out with the aim of identifying possible profiles of responsibility in relation to the crisis under investigation.”
The origins of the water crisis
For the past two months, 28 municipalities served by the Camastra dam and Potenza, the capital of the Basilicata region, have been without running water. This affects 140,000 Lucanian inhabitants. The water supply is rationed and guaranteed for a maximum of ten hours a day. The hours vary from time to time. The first interruption occurred in June. The inconveniences for citizens, schools, accommodation, catering and personal care businesses, as well as private social services, are numerous. Some parents have decided to withdraw their children from school canteens because of the use of the waters of the Basento River, which has been affected by various pollution phenomena in the past, as confirmed by the judiciary. Hence the concern of the communities, who have come together in a Public Water Committee, which is carrying out a mobilisation to demand transparency from the institutions and concrete commitments so that the emergency is not only resolved, but that it does not recur in the future.
On the one hand, there are climate changes, with a reduction in rainfall in 2023/2024, according to Acque del Sud (formerly Eipli), by 80 per cent compared to the average of around 110 million cubic metres. On the other hand, the lack of maintenance of the dam, which dates back to the 1960s, from the cleaning of the seabed to the interconnection with other reservoirs, to the lack of testing, which has led the National Dam Authority to impose a reduction in the flow of the dam itself for safety reasons, which has fallen from 17/20 million cubic metres to 7 million cubic metres in the last five years. A major contributor to the water crisis is the dispersion caused by leaking pipes, which, according to Istat data, places Basilicata at the top of the national ranking with 65 per cent, peaking at 71 per cent in Potenza.
The President of the Basilicata Region, Vito Bardi (FI), in his second term, elected for the first time in 2019 and appointed by the national government as water emergency commissioner, expresses his “satisfaction” with the results of the tests carried out by the judiciary. “We were sure – he says – that the analyses confirmed the conformity of the water and therefore its drinkability, in line with what has already been certified by Acquedotto Lucano, Arpa Basilicata and Arpa Puglia. We are equally certain that these results will further reassure the population and silence the instrumental alarmism of those who have tried to speculate on the emergency and the health of the Lucanians in recent days. As far as I am concerned, in my capacity as Commissioner for the Water Emergency, I will continue to work and monitor to ensure that everything is under control and that there are no further critical incidents, for which responsibility must certainly be sought. We, and I would like to thank all those who have worked tirelessly, are the ones who have prevented the interruption of the water supply, who have prevented the arrival of the tankers and who have worked and are working to put an end to the emergency”.
Complaint to the Public Prosecutor by the Public Water Committee
For its part, the Public Water Committee, which has been extended to include the National Forum “Water as a Common Good”, continues to demand clarity. In a complaint sent to the Public Prosecutor’s Office and to forty bodies involved in the management of water resources, five main points are raised. Firstly, the powers conferred on the commissioner. The civil protection decree would define the actions to be carried out, ranging from the collection of springs to the digging of wells and the interconnection of existing aqueducts, without even considering the abstraction of water from rivers. The official documents also fail to mention the derogations to the Consolidated Law on the Environment for the potabilisation and classification of the river, which stipulates that the water of a river can only be potabilised after a classification based on sampling over a period of at least 12 months, which obviously did not take place in this specific case.
The Committee also asks for clarification on the lack of accreditation of the Arpa Basilicata laboratories by the Accredia certification body, set up by the Ministry of Health, and on the risk analyses carried out in accordance with the protocol provided for in Legislative Decree 18 of 2023.
Finally, there are doubts about the preventive procedures for environmental assessment, transparency and participation. The Basento water catchment project, according to the same indication of the Civil Protection Ordinance, should have been subject to a procedure to verify its subjection to VIA (Environmental Impact Assessment), with preventive filing of a study on environmental and health impacts for at least seven days to collect observations from municipalities, associations and citizens. “The commissioner – says the committee – should have described the project in detail in the documentation before it was approved, explaining its conformity with the regulations, highlighting its possible impact on health and the environment and, above all, illustrating the various alternatives for supply in the short, medium and long term, including any strategy to make the exceptional Basento water catchment area as short as possible”.
The mobilisation also involves Lucanians who live outside the region and are concerned about their land, historically rich in water and forests. The online petition launched by brothers Luca and Alessandro Collodoro, originally from Tricarico but who live and work in the province of Turin, asking for the intervention of the national government, has gathered more than 1500 signatures.
It remains to be seen when it will be possible to return to normality and how the planned infrastructure work on the dam will be able to coincide with its filling in the event of sufficient rainfall. The rainfall of the last two days does not seem to have been decisive.
