In six hours, more than 126 millimeters of water fell on Saturday, November 26 on the island of Ischia, off the city of Naples. These heavy rains caused a gigantic landslide in the town of Casamicciola Terme, a spa resort of 8,000 inhabitants in winter, near Naples. The still provisional report on Sunday reported 2 dead, including a 5-year-old girl, 10 missing, 4 injured, 200 evacuated and 167 displaced.
“The mountain came down, Salvatore Lorini, 45, a resident of Ischia, explained to AFP. There was a devastation of shops, cars, hotels and it had already happened nine years ago. » The images showed the remains of cars and buses crushed by the violence of the mudslide and rocks. Searches continued to find people trapped under the mud. Already in 2017, the city was hit by an earthquake that killed two people, but was completely destroyed by a much more powerful earthquake at the end of the 19th century.e century.
An urbanization that destroys nature
The Italian Council of Ministers declared a state of emergency on the island and released 2 million euros to deal with the emergency. But for specialists, we should not be surprised by what happened: “In Ischia there is an urbanization that has hit and devastated the whole territory”told the Time.news agency Tommaso Moramarco, director of the Institute for Research and Hydro-Geological Protection. “When the island entered the period of mass tourism, the growth of infrastructure was exponential, suffocating all the natural elements of the territory and covering everything with cement”denounced for his part the geologist Mario Tozzi in the pages of The printrecalling the existence of tens of thousands of abusive constructions in Ischia.