A note from the president of Lealtà e Condivisione, Carlo Gradenigo, on the situation of the water supply in Syracuse: “The quality of life in Syracuse depends on the ‘drinking’ water that we do not drink”:
In Sicily, where the drought is about to return, between the 1960s and the 1990s the equivalent of about 24 billion euros was spent on hydraulic works that were never used, including the much-vaunted desalination plants, of which Gela is a dead example.
Among these works is the former Cassa del Mezzogiorno pipeline. A 20-kilometre pipeline, built and never used, capable of supplying the city of Syracuse with a considerable quantity of low-mineral water from the upper Anapo Valley, relying on two (now dry) reservoirs of 65,000 cubic metres along the way. To understand what we are talking about, it is enough to consider that all the reservoirs of the Syracuse aqueduct together have a capacity of only 17,500 cubic metres, and it is no coincidence that last summer the drop in the level of the reservoirs led to water rationing in the city.
The infrastructure is there, the design of the project for the restoration of this pipeline is included in the existing contract signed in 2021 by the current manager Siam (which expires in two months), the Region has allocated another billion euros for the restoration of these works by the Land Reclamation Consortia, but the Mayor of Syracuse, who is also ATI president and councillor for the capital’s water service, and the Deputy Mayor, who is also manager of the Land Reclamation Consortium, do not seem to care. They prefer to focus on a new well field, rather than on good water from natural rainfall, which is already silted up and capable of leaving a city of 120,000 inhabitants like Syracuse dry even in winter with a flash of lightning.
A local policy that matches the regional one, where instead of restoring existing dams, reservoirs and infrastructure, new desalination plants are financed, while drinking water ends up in the sea and 100 per cent of the projects under the NRP are rejected for technical incompetence, or so they say. A city’s quality of life depends on the ‘drinking’ water that we do not drink.
