Cultivated fields in the province of Viterbo.
(Universal Images Group North America LLC / DeAgostini / Alamy)
The agricultural locality of Pascolaro is an ecological bomb. Under almost 150 hectares of land along the Tiber valley, in the province of Viterbo, about 20 thousand tons of special waste are buried.
It is the largest polluted area in Lazio, the third in Italy, and is located in the municipality of Graffignano, a small town with just over two thousand inhabitants. For this reason, the government has included it in the list of sites to be reclaimed, including sharing the 500 million envisaged by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr).
The story of Pascolaro begins in 2006, when a quarry owned by the brothers Paolo, Roberto and Luciano Nocchi ends up at the center of the forest ranger’s investigations. The following year the land was seized for illicit waste disposal: according to the reconstructions of the provincial investigative units of the environmental and forestry police (Nipaf), in that period the waste was buried in the area instead of being properly disposed of at the Central Italy Artifacts of Alviano, in the province of Terni.
The confirmation then comes from a report from the ARPA (the regional agency for environmental protection) of Viterbo: the document reveals the presence in the soil of pollutants such as heavy metals, Pcb (polychlorinated biphenyls) and hydrocarbons.
Everything seemed to indicate a concrete danger from the beginning, but the years have passed in the silence of residents and institutions. So much so that until 2018 wheat continued to be grown alongside contaminated land.
Choose between two rights
About six people are diagnosed with cancer every day in the province of Viterbo. No one, or almost, has ever linked the Pascolaro story to the high incidence of tumors, although according to a 2020 report by the ASL of Viterbo “one in three men and one in four women will face a diagnosis of malignant tumor”.
In a municipality with so few inhabitants it is not easy to find someone without at least one friend or relative who worked in the village quarry. People who prefer not to speak to avoid losing their jobs, forced to choose between two fundamental rights: that to work and that to health.
Among the few to keep attention on the affair are six citizens – Simone Barbetta, Diego De Doni, Andrea Gubbiotti, Tiziano Materazzo, Erika Merlone and Daniele Rufini – who in 2008 lost a friend who worked in the quarry due to a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“There is a deafening silence on environmental issues, even if in this area it is full of leukemia and tumors,” says Barbetta. And the danger might not concern only the inhabitants and workers of Graffignano: “The Tiber overflows every now and then and the accumulated waste ends up in the river. From here to Ostia there are tens of kilometers of farms that use that water ”, Gubbiotti points out.
As if that weren’t enough, the company that has to dismantle the Italian nuclear plants (Sogin) recently indicated Corchiano, a few tens of kilometers from Graffignano, as a suitable place to host a national deposit of radioactive waste.
In the last 15 years the leaders of local institutions have changed and the criminal trial against the Nocchi brothers has been prescribed, but not the civil proceeding. There is an ordinance with which the province of Viterbo asks the entrepreneurs Paolo and Roberto Nocchi and their lawyer to “adopt the necessary safety measures, reclamation and environmental restoration in the sites located in the municipality of Graffignano”.
In 2017, the Lazio region financed an analysis of soil and water contamination levels in Pascolaro, Casettone and Bivio del Pellegrino with 585 thousand euros, made public only in 2020. The report shows that “to date there is contamination and it must be managed ”, explains engineer Pier Luigi Gianforte. The ARPA and the province of Viterbo, however, have requested further investigations.
In Italy there are hundreds of similar cases: the ministry of ecological transition has identified 269 potentially contaminated areas. Until the Lazio region decides how to divide the Pnrr resources on the territory, it is not known how much Pascolaro will have available to carry out the reclamation.
While waiting, everything is silent in the municipality of Graffignano, opening the topic in the village remains a very delicate question.