Legionella in the water pipes of the Palermo municipal police headquarters: chemical toilets for officers on the road. There is an alarm in via Ugo La Malfa and from tomorrow, May 1st, smart working will begin for all administrative employees, which will continue from Thursday to Monday, days in which the structure will remain closed. A date and news, the latter, which should not sound new to the most attentive ears: yesterday afternoon, in fact, an extraordinary closure of the command headquarters was announced.
«The decision was made because in that period works to sanitize the water systems will be carried out at the headquarters in via La Malfa – we read in the note sent by the municipal police force -. For any eventuality, citizens can contact the switchboard on 0916954111″. This explains the reason for the sudden closure. From the headquarters in via La Malfa they made it known that it shouldn’t be anything serious, but “as a greater precaution, sanitization has been arranged”. Administrative staff at home, therefore, and chemical toilets instead for the traffic police who operate along the city streets. This is how the Municipality and municipal police organized themselves.
The command was asked to carry out chlorine dioxide treatments in the water collection tanks and pipes. «A prevention intervention – they explain from the command – required to avoid the risk of infection. The alarm was raised when one of the employees fell ill. And so the procedures began to eliminate the risk of contagion. After the operations, a check will be carried out and the activity, which will not stop in these days, will resume at full capacity”.
We hadn’t heard much about legionella in the last period: the last cases occurred about a year and a half ago, in September 2022, when the bacterium that causes a serious form of pneumonia was discovered in a building in Via Principe di Belmonte, later evacuated to prevent the infection from spreading, and to other neighborhoods of the city. Without forgetting the death of the seventy-six-year-old engineer, Ciro Cozzolino, originally from Fano, who had spent a short holiday in the city, staying between 24 and 29 August two years ago at the Politeama hotel. Then the long closure of the Municipality’s representative office, Villa Niscemi, whose water pipes appeared contaminated.
