Storm of words on the bad weather emergency
Avoiding storms is impossible, but avoiding its damage is a duty for a country that entrusts its fate to a national recovery and resilience plan. Guiglia's notebook
No need for science, weather or statistics. The news is enough to understand that when "exceptional events" are repeated several times, and with ever greater intensity, they cease to be exceptional. Therefore, even the language of politics should adapt to the "extraordinary normality" of thunderstorms, storms, hailstones as heavy as tennis balls that unleash pandemonium in midsummer.
DON'T CALL IT AN EMERGENCY, BUT BAD WEATHER
Therefore, delete the word "emergency" from the government's vocabulary and add the item "bad weather" to the next budget law, if you really want to "secure the territory", as is repeated with punctual but impotent cadence at the the day after the storms. And therefore it has been repeating itself for years, given that out-of-season storms are now the rule throughout Italy.
With the added insult that if in the North we die, unfortunately literally, of rain in the terrifying guise of a hurricane, in the South we die of heat with the asphyxiating mantle of fires. Milan drowns, Palermo burns.
The hydrogeological instability of our beloved but mistreated country is there for all to see and it makes little sense to discuss – always and rigorously the next day – whether deaths, injuries, extensive damage, power outages are the result "above all" or "also" of climate change which rages on the historic lack of prevention to protect the environment and our cities.
What is inconceivable now and immediately is that a sixteen-year-old, Chiara Rossetti, could die from a tree that fell on the tent in which she was in the scout camp of Corteno Golgi in the Brescia area. That four provinces of the Veneto, and especially in the Verona area, register dozens of injured due to very strong winds and hailstorms. That a region-locomotive like Lombardy should ask for a state of emergency due to "extreme phenomena".
But the orange alert and the great commitment witnessed by the Civil Protection should be the final act, and not the initial one, of a long and structural institutional and political path that will put Italy, if not sheltered from the violent warnings that the climate it even sends in the summer, at least in the best chance to defend itself.
Avoiding thunderstorms is impossible, but avoiding its damage is a duty for a country that entrusts its destiny precisely to the plans, and in particular to the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.
Published in L'Arena di Verona, Il Giornale di Vicenza and Bresciaoggi
www.federicoguiglia.com
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/emergenza-maltempo-temporali/ on Thu, 27 Jul 2023 05:47:44 +0000.