Nightmare day at Capriwhere there was none waterfall due to a fault in the water main that supplies the island. For this reason, starting this morning only residents can disembark, but not tourists. This is established by an urgent ordinance issued by the mayor Paolo Falco: without supplies – underlines the mayor – it is impossible to guarantee essential services taking into account the “thousands of people” who travel to the island every day during the tourist season. “The health and hygiene situation is explosive, we have taken our countermeasures and activated the crisis unit and issued a restrictive order,” Falco told LaPresse. At the moment water is still supplied in most of the island. Some isolated areas of the municipality of Anacapri are dry. However, only local reservoirs supply the network, which in the absence of supplies from the mainland threaten to run out.
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The solution
The water supply on Capri should normalize around 8pm. The technical problem that had blocked the supplies, an air bubble in the mainland mains pipe, has been resolved. This was made known by the prefect of Naples, Michele di Bari, after hearing from the Gori water company, responsible for the supply, during a meeting of the Rescue Coordination Committee held a few minutes ago in the prefecture.
The air bubble was created following the large leak, which was then repaired, which occurred on Thursday 20 June in the supply pipeline that serves both the island of Capri and the Sorrento peninsula. At the moment, the Gori water company informs, “the filling of the underwater pipeline to Capri has been completed and the service to the first users has been started”. In the evening it is expected that the supply will return to normal throughout the island.
Chaos in the ports
The stop to the disembarkation of tourists on Capri due to the water emergency has caused consequences in the ports of departure towards the blue island, starting from the Molo Beverello in Naples where there were long queues of passengers at the ticket offices of the shipping companies. The order from the mayor of Capri was notified shortly after nine o’clock (in some cases by the police directly at the company box offices), causing an immediate stop to ticketing; the ships and hydrofoils that had already left for Capri were contacted via radio by the maritime authority who ordered their return to port and the disembarkation of passengers. At Beverello the companies are refunding hundreds of tickets even though many tourists preferred not to miss the day’s excursion and chose alternative destinations by boarding hydrofoils to Ischia, Sorrento or the Amalfi Coast.
Calmer situation at the port of Sorrento, the other departure hub for Capri from where the departures of many tourists were scheduled this morning; long but orderly queues and tourists waiting for refunds or to leave for other locations reachable by sea.
Capri, water main failure: what happened
The Gori water company, responsible for supply on the island of Capri, explains that “all investigations and checks are underway to resolve the critical issues and restore the service”. The origin of the problems was the sudden failure of the supply pipeline serving the Sorrento Peninsula and the island of Capri, which occurred on Thursday 20 June on State Road 145, in the municipality of Castellammare di Stabia.
The repair works, explains Gori, «were completed within the scheduled time. However, when the water flow was reopened, technical problems arose which still lead to water shortages in various locations in the municipalities of the Sorrento Peninsula and on the entire island of Capri.”
The exemption
Starting from 3.30pm today, the ban on disembarkation for non-residents on the island of Capri, caused by the water emergency, includes an exemption for tourists with hotel reservations. This is established by a new ordinance signed a short while ago by Mayor Paolo Falco. The reservation must be shown at the ticket office. The exemption, it is written in the text, applies only to customers of hotel facilities “who have sufficient water resources to guarantee hospitality”.
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