A complaint, a cry of alarm, but, above all, the bitter consideration of the profound silence on the part of the institutions. The day after the fire at the former landfill in Mazzarrà, the air is not only polluted but bitter. The one who highlights the need for the institutions to do an “examination of conscience” is Carmelo Pietrafitta, the mayor of the town affected by the fire whose “cry of alarm has remained unheard”, he writes in a long note.
“If only they had listened to me in time… Only this is my only and very bitter comment. I keep repeating it to myself since the afternoon of June 25th. Ever since some ignoble hand started the fire in several points near the landfill and itself subsequently licked it. Driven by the wind, the fire devoured the surface sheet and then burned the entire side of the waste dumped in the former district landfill in the Zuppà district”, we read.
“In recent years I have had to witness a continuous, exhausting and incomprehensible passing of the buck and a game of responsibility-bending. Facilitated, moreover, by regulatory provisions which seem to have been conceived only to remain on paper, without ever being able to have any effect or application of practical order. For years I had contributed to launching the idea of safeguarding and reclaiming the site through the reactivation of the plant downstream of the landfill. But, despite the obvious coherence of the project and its necessity and convenience for an entire district totally devoid of these essential services, to this day we are still waiting for the opinions of regional officials”, he continues.
“Three and a half years have passed since then!!! And do you know what? The law establishes that these opinions should be given within 60 days at the most. A detail that is not insignificant. The result, to date, is that we have remained inexorably stuck at the starting point, almost as if waiting for an announced disaster which then, punctually, materialized before our eyes”, he explains.
“It is truly heartbreaking to see that everything goes up in smoke knowing that, for decades, the Mazzarrà Sant’Andrea landfill has been included in the Regional Landfill Reclamation Plan and subsequently also in the MISE’s list of orphan sites and that for the remediation of the around 12 million Euros had already been allocated to the site with resources paid by the PNRR. The example of an elephantine public administration, which is unable to provide a concrete solution to the needs of the territory, is placed before us all today and I am starting to think, unfortunately, not even this disastrous accident will serve to give decisive impetus to the desired solutions and to the repeatedly requested interventions which had recently also been addressed to the Civil Protection for the implementation of urgent environmental protection and safeguard measures.”, he underlines.
“Faced with the flames burning the mass of waste that all the Municipalities of the Province of Messina, by direct and formal order of the Region, the Prefecture or the Regional Province itself, have deposited for years in the territory of the Municipality of Mazzarrà Sant’Andrea, I can’t help but wonder where those who authorized the dumping are today and what all those who until now have only been able to hold councils and meetings without ever reaching a solution to a problem in which the only predestined victim is the community of Mazzarrà Sant’Andrea together with that of Furnari and other neighboring towns which continue and will continue, who knows for how long, to suffer abuses, delays, second thoughts and postponements without ever reaching anything conclusive”, he adds.
“Today I feel disappointed by the institutions and, above all, by those apparatuses which, despite the interlocutions, reminders or warnings, have always remained deaf and indolent, as if the problem did not concern them. Or perhaps because, even if the ecological bomb, this would have happened anyway outside their garden… and only at the home of the Mazzarresi. On the other hand, I want to extend sincere thanks to the Prefect of Messina, Dr. Cosima Di Stani, for the always lively attention paid to the environmental issue concerning Mazzarrà Sant. ‘Andrea and the entire area,’ he concludes.
