The water crisis in Italy’s Basilicata is over, at least until the next drought.
Lake Camastra is full again and the regional president has unveiled a plan to avoid future emergencies. From November to January, the water in the artificial Camastra reservoir in Basilicata dried up due to drought. Then, in mid-January, the water level suddenly rose again. After a few days of snowfall and as many days of rain, which melted the snow and swelled the rivers that flow into the lake, the volume rose to 4.5 million cubic metres.
Although the amount of water was much lower than at the same time a year ago, the extraordinary commissioner for the water emergency and president of the region, Vito Bardi of Forza Italia, has allowed Acquedotto Lucano, the public company that manages the water network throughout Basilicata, to resume using water from the lake to feed the pipes of 29 municipalities in the area, including the capital, Potenza. On 21 January, in a hearing before the environment and budget committees of the Chamber of Deputies, he announced a series of measures to prevent a new water crisis next summer.
The plan can be summed up in three points: increasing the reservoir’s capacity, linking it to other reservoirs, and replacing pipes to reduce water leakage. The commissioner has asked the Ministry of Infrastructure for permission to increase the capacity of the reservoir, which was built in the 1970s to provide drinking water and irrigation for villages in the area, by two million cubic metres. The lake has a total capacity of 32 million cubic metres of water, but can only hold a maximum of 9.3 million cubic metres. In 2019, the Technical Office for Dams in Naples, which is part of the Ministry of Infrastructure, ordered the regional authority that manages it to reduce its use because the dam, which was inaugurated in 1971, does not meet the necessary safety requirements in the event of an earthquake. At the time, the lake held 20 million cubic metres of water and the authorities were forced to drain part of it.
Since then, every time the water level rises too high, the bulkheads are opened to drain the water. The reservoir was built to save water, but this is not being done,’ says the mayor of Brindisi Montagna, Gerardo Larocca, who is also president of the ANCI (National Association of Italian Municipalities) for Basilicata. In his opinion, ‘if this problem is not solved when the drought returns this summer, we will be without water again’.
In November 2024, after months of drought, there was barely 420,000 cubic metres of water and much of the lake was nothing more than dried mud. The drying up of the Camastra had caused a serious water crisis in the villages of the complex of the so-called Lucanian Dolomites, mountains with a morphology similar to that of the more famous Alpine Dolomites. Acquedotto Lucano stopped supplying water for twelve hours a day and the company’s sole director, Alfonso Andretta, called on the mayors to issue by-laws prohibiting the use of drinking water for irrigation, washing and filling swimming pools and fountains.
At the end of October, the Council of Ministers appointed Bardi as extraordinary emergency commissioner. Acque del Sud, a company belonging to the Ministry of the Economy, which has been managing the reservoir since 1 January 2024, had dug a three-metre-deep basin to collect the little water that was left and had built a floating pumping system on top of it, which the citizens called “the raft”. The pumps drew it to the Lucano aqueduct. Despite these measures, a month later the lake was completely dry.
Extracting water from the Camastra, with four plants working in tandem, was a complex and very energy-intensive operation, one of Acquedotto Lucano’s biggest expenses,” says Salvatore Gravino, the company’s manager. To avoid a total shutdown of the water supply, which would have left thousands of citizens without water, the commissioner had a pipe laid to take water from the Basento River, which runs through the area, and bring it to the dam. From there it was sent to a drinking water plant and then to the water network. This work cost Acquedotto Lucano 3.7 million euros, plus a further 200,000 euros for civil protection.
However, the decision to supply water from the Basento to 140,000 people in Lucania has caused a great deal of protest, as effluent from two industrial estates flows into the river and there have been judicial investigations into illegal discharges from some factories in the past. Analyses by the Regional Environmental Protection Agency (ARPA) of Basilicata and Apulia have shown that Basento water is safe to drink once it has been treated in drinking water plants.
The Commissioner’s plan is to connect Lake Camastra to the Alta Val d’Agri and Pantano basins, also in Basilicata. On the other hand, Acquedotto Lucano is repairing leaks in the pipelines which, according to Bardi’s report to the Chamber of Deputies, leak 53 per cent of the water fed into the 13,000-kilometre water network in Basilicata. The losses have been quantified at 12.25 cubic metres per kilometre per day. The networks, many of which are old, have been managed with a logic based on repairing faults rather than on a planned replacement plan,” said Bardi.
Gravino explained that Acquedotto Lucano’s technicians are replacing the most damaged pipelines “to reduce losses”, using funds from the National Plan for Resilience and Recovery (PNRR), financed by European funds. The first works were carried out in Brindisi Montagna, where a large part of the Camastra water was leaking before it reached the Masseria Romaniello drinking water plant in Potenza. The company that distributes water in Basilicata is also looking for new sources.
