Vibo, two months without drinking water and with a newborn baby: Giulia is a young mother who lives in the square between the police academy and the hospital where, since 17 January, a decree has banned the use of water even for personal hygiene: “We do everything with mineral water, we live among plastic bottles. I can’t even shampoo my hair, the municipality has told me to go to the hairdresser.”
There are bottles of mineral water everywhere: in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bathroom, in the six-month-old girl’s bedroom. Dozens of empty bottles are stacked in a plastic bag, waiting to be disposed of.
The home of Giulia, a policewoman and mother of an almost six-month-old baby girl, has been besieged by plastic bottles since 17 January, when the Vibo City Council issued an order banning the use of drinking water in the quadrilateral of streets that runs from the Police Academy to the hospital. Two months without the possibility of using what comes out of the taps, not so much for drinking (because nobody here is that crazy), but not even for washing or cooking.
‘An inconvenience that has lasted for weeks’
“A huge inconvenience that has been going on for weeks”, complains the woman from Catania. “We are forced to wash our baby with mineral water”, she explains. It is an emergency that despairs the young mother, who, after turning to the city council, asking to intervene in vain and trying everything, has decided to turn to the media. “Is it possible that, in 2025, entire districts of a city will be without water?” she asks herself. Her days are punctuated by the emergency. Even for washing clothes, she and her husband have to rely on the child’s paternal grandparents. She also asks her in-laws for a shower. For nappies, she has only one alternative: wet wipes. “Luckily I breastfeed my daughter, otherwise I would have had to wash the bottles with mineral water,” she says.
The young policeman has had several meetings with the Councillor for Public Works, Salvatore Monteleone: “At first he accepted our requests, he was sympathetic, but now he doesn’t answer any more.”
The couple, who are new parents, asked for the tankers to intervene, but the answer they received from a municipal employee was disconcerting. “I complained that I couldn’t even shampoo my hair. And do you know what the council’s reply was? Go to the hairdresser.”
The ban on drinking water in some areas of Vibo is imperative: “Water cannot be used for eating, personal hygiene, oral hygiene, washing baby items (baby bottles, baby food containers, etc.), washing and preparing food, washing dishes and kitchen utensils and sanitary equipment.” The streets affected by the ban are Via Antonio Assisi, Via Filippo Polistina, Via Angelo Leone and Via Emilio Sacerdote, where the young couple and their daughter live.
“We feel abandoned by the municipality”, Giulia continues, “How much longer will this situation last? We are tired and indignant. This emergency is affecting my life. My parents who live in Sicily joined us to stay for a few weeks, but instead they will only stay for a couple of days.”
Giulia’s mother, Carmela, discouragedly confirms that they won’t be able to stay as long as they would have liked: “We hoped that the drinking ban would be lifted before coming to Vibo, but this emergency never ended, so in the end we decided to leave anyway to see our granddaughter. But in a couple of days we will have to leave because it’s impossible to go on like this, especially when there are several people in the house.”
