An Italian agony begs answers of Rio+20
They describe a great wall of water racing down every available street and alleyway bearing boulders, trees, cars – smashing homes, shops, roads and pavements, and carting them to a grizzly terminal moraine in the sea. Every resident of Monterosso has a story to tell of what happened on 25 October 2011.
For many, the flash floods in a couple of coastal villages in northern Italy last year merited little detailed news coverage. In all, some half dozen people were swept to their deaths. News organisations require more, in terms of loss of life, to send a reporter.
But as I have discovered this week on a trip to Italy, these were no ordinary towns. They sit in the mountainous heart of the Cinque Terre, a Unesco world heritage site. As their name implies, there are five of them. Two were inundated, the other three were untouched.
Each of the towns has its own unique cliff-side character. They were built during the 11th century – each has a square, a little port and at least one church. None of them is easily accessible by road. Boat, train (surprisingly), or footpath represent the best way of reaching any of them.
Walking the hills to whose cliff sides the towns cling, the evidence of catastrophe is still evident. Uprooted trees, gullets gouged into gorges, landslips and heaps of rock speak to the force of what happened.
Flood damage
Sitting in the Al Pozzo café in Monterosso it is impossible to imagine the scale of what happened just seven months ago. The waiter describes rain so heavy that he could no longer discern the features of the bar 20 feet across the street. Flood waters began to rise to perhaps a metre before a terrifying roar announced that the hills could hold no more. Within minutes, the vast and destructive traffic of brown water smashed trees. Boulders, bricks and vehicles had rendered the café unrecognisable and left the waiters clambering ever higher to save their own lives.
Today, you would not know it had ever happened. Although in Vernazza, an hour and a half’s trek along the cliff’s edge, the recovery work is still in progress. Indeed the power and efficiency of the Italian relief services is awesome to behold. You see a different Italy to the one that talks of Silvio Berlusconi, of local corruption, and of national banking failure. Here, the road system has been rebuilt, the towns repaired, the power lines restored and new flood defences built. More than 500 volunteers came from across Italy to Monterosso alone to aid the rebuilding – many of them relatives of those who still live here. The photos of the recovery of Al Pozzo depict recognisable members of staff armed with shovels, mops, buckets and barrows, where once they carried scalding hot risotto a la mare.
When I was a child, visiting the floods of Lynmouth in north Devon, I was told it was “Mother Nature’s course”. In the build up to Rio+20 – the summit designed to take stock of developments since the first environmental meeting in Rio 20 years ago – we ask a different question. Is it global warming? Is it man induced climate change? Floods in the Cinque Terre have been described as a ‘once in 50 years event’. But it seems never before has the event been of such power and scale. And those 50 years (the last floods were in 1969) have given way to 43 years. We still do not know what this beauteous medieval settlement is telling us about our planet. Perhaps that’s why, even if Rio+20 does no more than concentrate our minds, it remains a vastly important moment of review and looking ahead.
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