Almost 20 days after the flood, yesterday was the first day of yellow alert. We look at the reconstruction and Bonaccini asks that “the choice of the commissioner is not an electoral calculation”. The President of the Republic has arrived in the affected areas and has decided to allocate the Paul VI Prize to the John XXIII community for the damaged shelters. “Here everything was done with great skill but above all with great generosity. There will be constant and not momentary attention,” he said
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It hasn’t rained in Romagna for a few days, but only since yesterday the weather alert has dropped to yellow, after a month spent almost entirely on orange or red alert (THE SPECIAL). While the damage count continues and reconstruction is being thought about (HOW THE FUNDS OF THE PNRR CAN BE USED), the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella arrived today for a visit to the areas devastated by the flood. “All of Italy is close to you and you won’t be alone in the reconstruction, which must be fast,” he said. Yesterday the head of state announced that he will donate the sum linked to the Paul VI Prize, which was presented to him by the Pope, to the John XXIII Community, founded by Don Oreste Benzi in the Rimini area, and to its shelters affected by the floods.
Mattarella’s visit
The head of state made a helicopter inspection of Modigliana, one of the most affected municipalities. He reached the village in the Forlì Apennines where he was welcomed by Bonaccini, as well as the mayors and citizens. Then he moved to Forlì, to meet the volunteers who worked in the emergency. “This is a challenging, difficult moment. I have seen so many wounds in the area. I know well how much, as regards many homes, many businesses, the streets, it is necessary to recover with courage and decision to relaunch common life”, he said. The president then moved to Cesena, where he was welcomed with “Romagna mia” and the Mameli anthem. The volunteers of the sorting center at the “don Milani” school gave him a yellow vest used by those who help, with the words ‘tin bota’, the encouragement in Romagna dialect that became the slogan of the resistance after the flood. Then another stop in the early afternoon in Ravenna. “You had to face an unpredictable phenomenon of unimaginable dimensions. The time for decisions and interventions was extremely short. You had to define and plan decisive interventions, even with a lot of courage. Everything was done with great skill but above all with great generosity and I want to thank you for this – he said speaking in the town hall -. Our country will have to worry about organizing preventive defenses for phenomena of this kind, more than has happened so far”. And he added: “This is a territory of great importance for Italy. All of this requires a quick, immediate restart, without breaks. We need to make sure that there are no feelings of surrender, of abandonment. There will be constant and not momentary attention from national public institutions. And I too will participate so that, with the lights off, we continue with the same attention”. After Ravenna, Mattarella reached Lugo di Romagna, another center that suffered major flooding two weeks ago: he visited the Rossini theater and assured that ” it will return as before”. Then the last stop in Faenza, where he met the mayors of the area.
The situation in Conselice
In the meantime, the situation in Conselice is also slowly coming under control, the town in the Ravenna area which has become one of the symbols of the catastrophe because, for days, it was not possible to free a large part of the town from the water, causing stagnation which also created public health concerns. The situation has not yet been completely resolved, but is improving: about 50 dewatering pumps are trying to convey the water into the reclamation canals that flow into the Reno. The evacuation orders issued by the Municipality are restricting their perimeter and work has begun what, for over a week already, has begun to be done in the other flooded places: shoveling mud, returning to homes, disposing of mountains of waste. Meanwhile, the first results of the checks carried out by Arpae, the regional environmental protection agency, on the waters deposited near the industrial areas affected by the floods are reassuring: no environmental pollution was in fact detected near the Environmental Workshop, an important production plant in Conselice. Attention remains high, with new withdrawals involving other production sites.
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The displaced are decreasing
Today, with the official start of the tourist season approaching, Arpae will also monitor bathing water in 98 points of the Adriatic coast: comforting results are expected from these analyses, also by virtue of the campaign launched by the ministry and the Region to convince tourists not to give up their holidays on the Romagna coast. The number of people who have been forced to leave their homes is also decreasing. Those welcomed in the reception centers made available by the Municipalities or in hotels are in fact 1,128, about 200 in less than 24 hours before. The Bologna-Rimini railway is back in operation and some important road communication routes closed in recent weeks have been reopened, but throughout the Region there are hundreds of municipal and provincial roads still closed to traffic. Many of these will have to be rebuilt. Not to mention the instability that has hit the Apennines: at the moment 758 major landslides are confirmed to be monitored, as well as thousands of active micro-landslides.
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Soon the rules on reconstruction and the commissioner
Governor Bonaccini asks that “the choice of the commissioner is not an electoral calculation. We expect hundreds of millions from the EU, they have made a precise commitment”. The government has been working for days on a plan that could arrive in the Council of Ministers in the coming weeks, in view of the appointment of the new commissioner who will take over the dossier of phase 2 in Emilia Romagna.We are thinking of a national structure for reconstruction, with a person in charge who can manage the funds, like a small department national, European and Pnrr for the reconstruction of the areas affected by hydrogeological instability.The project should not be entrusted to Bonaccini himself, as Antonio Tajani suggests, according to whom “a person who can devote himself full time” will be needed.At the same time we work to a mediation that does not dissatisfy anyone, first of all the territories: “I am preparing a bill that I will submit to the CDM, according to which the commissioner, even if he does not have to be the president of the Region, not in the specific case but I speak in general because the project for us it is a national model, it will have to be approved by the governor, who has concurrent competence in the matter”, explains Musumeci. Among the last possible candidates there would be Bertolaso and Figliuolo, names that demonstrate the need for a technical figure who has administrative skills. “The whole government is committed internally and internationally to identifying all the resources available to deal with the emergency phase” of the floods in Emilia-Romagna and “the structural one for reconstruction”, meanwhile, assures the Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida, on the sidelines of the Agriculture Council in Brussels. “We have highlighted that the CAP reserve fund is not enough if we want to strategically address climate adversities that portend an aggravation in the future”, he adds.
