Today’s edition of “Il Giornale di Sicilia” focuses on the waste emergency in Palermo.
Another night of fires and work for the fire brigade teams. The city seems to be falling back into the waste emergency again and the peripheral neighborhoods, not served by the RAP operators for days, decide to dedicate themselves again to the do-it-yourself solution. Various fire teams lit up Zen (for the third day in a row) and Bonagia with sirens. In total, four fires were set: a first intervention was necessary in via Fausto Coppi around 11pm, where the first of the open-air landfills was transformed into ash. Not even enough time to complete the operation, a second operation became necessary, around 1.30 am, in the same street a few hundred meters from the first waste bonfire.
At the same time, other teams were engaged in via San Filippo, in the via dell’Orsa Minore area, at 3.30 am and in via Spagna at 6 in the morning. For days the phenomenon has been spreading again, precisely reflecting the intolerance of residents abandoned in the garbage. «We haven’t seen operators for at least four days – said a resident of the Bonagia area – we are overwhelmed by abandonments and ordinary waste. You can’t expect people to keep their rubbish at home.” Many open-air landfills remained, for the moment, unharmed and spared from the flames. Starting right from Via Santo Filippo, where the bins are now submerged with all types of waste: the stations are floundering among bags, pieces of furniture and corpses of what were once household appliances.
Scenes that follow one another far and wide across the territory and for Rap, intervention with bobcats and mechanical shovels is necessary. Yesterday morning, there was a constant coming and going of trucks and workers from the Piazzetta Cairoli company in the neighborhood, busy removing as many piles as possible. However, the collection proceeds in fits and starts and the residents of the neighborhood decide to set fire to the open-air landfills to eliminate the mass of rubbish which in the heat causes bad smells, playing the role of attractor for mice and cockroaches. And the situation doesn’t improve if you move to other neighborhoods. The expanses of rubbish also appear in the streets of Borgo Nuovo, where the president of the fifth constituency Andrea Aiello thunders: «It is clear to everyone – he attacks – that the three-phase emergency has now evolved: the emergency Rap is everyday and citizens are drowning in waste and abandonment.”
