Signed by around twenty people, among the thousands who in May 2023 had homes invaded by water in the area from Roncalceci to Fornace Zarattini, an appeal was presented to the Superior Court of Public Waters of Florence requesting the start of a technical consultancy (this is a preventive technical assessment or ATP) which ascertains, in summary, the causes of the floods of a year ago starting from the assumption that “the rain was not exceptional”.
The appeal, illustrated yesterday in a press conference, was coordinated by the lawyer Giuseppe Della Casa and attached to it is a three hundred page dossier drawn up by the Bolognese geologist Riccardo Galassi, both activated by the ‘We are here’ committee of which Alessandra is president Musumeci. This opens a civil dispute with a multiplicity of counterparties, indicated in the Emilia Romagna Region, in the Province and Municipality of Ravenna and in the Reclamation Consortium. The appeal to the ATP is a preliminary action to give the judges the opportunity to ascertain from the outset whether or not the subject of the dispute exists, so as to avoid the initiation of an unfounded civil case. “We turned to the Superior Water Court of Florence – underlined the lawyer Della Casa – because it is also the competent body for the territory of our region”; these are specialized judiciaries (eight courts throughout Italy) also on the subject of flood damage. “We are only looking for the truth, we are not launching a fight against anyone – specifies Della Casa – but there are questions that await an answer, first of all whether everything was done before and during the event that due to the regulations and plans on hydrogeological risk had to be made”.
A question which, almost superfluous to point out, also takes us back a long way, to the first decade of the century when the Region launched the hydrogeological risk plan, then updated seven years ago, and which envisaged many interventions along the rivers, very few of which were carried out and which has also been written about in these columns. But it is equally realistic to highlight doubts about the fact that technical consultancy can ever establish a causal link between those missed works (on the embankments, on the expansion tanks, etc.) and the widespread disaster of a year ago, or rather on their effectiveness in preventing the events. The scenario within which the appeal takes place was illustrated by the geologist who drew up the dossier who starts from a denialist assumption of the classification of those events as exceptional.
“Be careful, I don’t want to terrify anyone, but let’s not talk about an extraordinary event, it was rains that have been recurring for twenty years” he wrote in the dossier and reiterated verbally yesterday. And starting from this assumption he placed the emphasis on those works on rivers and canals that were planned and never carried out in the last 20 years to the point of also denouncing the alleged inefficiency, in concrete terms, of the Civil Protection.
Carlo Raggi
