Italy’s Disaster Management Is a Disaster

From the Coronavirus Pandemic to the Flooding of Emilia Romagna, Elite Interests Rule

Jun 11, 2023

Volunteers clear the streets following flooding in Sant'Agata sul Santerno, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy on 21 May. Photo credit:: Andreas Solaro

Almost one month since the catastrophic flooding in Emilia Romagna, and each time I close my eyes I see mud. My fingers are so dry from weeks of washing and salvaging or disposing of muddy, wet possessions that I can no longer use my fingerprint to enter my electronic devices. I have been on the receiving end of charity from used clothes handouts—not in the sense of Berlin parents doing clothing swaps in the communal spirit of sharing, but in the “we were wiped out and my children need clothes” type of sharing—to the canned and dried foods that were delivered to us.

However, there were massive problems with how everything was handled from before the flooding occured to the operations to help those of us without food and transportation, not least of which is the country’s Civil Protection Department, what I have nicknamed “Team Prada.” These workers proved unable to offer very much in terms of actual help aside from linguistic constructs. “What do you need?” asked one retired gentleman on my first visit from Civil Protection. I pointed to my dead car and said, “Can you find a mechanic who can come out here to assess or even rescue my vehicle? I need this for our survival here in the country.” He turned to the car in such an awkward manner that it was clear he had no clue about auto mechanics; yet, he still stuck his nose under the hood for about ten seconds, bounced back up, and stated, “You need another car.” That was my first “No shit, Sherlock moment.”

I would soon encounter many more of these moments as Team Prada would be consistant in their smiley-faced visits to our home whilst offering only myriad platitudes such as, “You aren’t the only one suffering.” Team Prada could be neatly divided into two groups: the retirees who, although had good intentions were ill-equipped to help either due to age or fashion. When asked one day what I needed and I asked for help moving one piece of furniture outside from one place to another, he retored, “I can’t dirty my shoes.” The second faction of Team Prada were younger, university educated folks, mostly women, who came with pen and paper asking me “Make a wish” questions. I answered their questions realising very quickly that this was a rhetorical exercise for them—that nothing I said I needed would actually be fulfilled as I was told variations of: “I am sorry, we can’t get you any fresh fruits or vegetables” and “I am afraid you have to make the best of it as we can’t do anything about transportation.” We have been given such a colossal supply of Mulino Bianco biscuits that it could send us all into diabetic shock. Meanwhile we must walk two kilometres to a main road to hitchhike to get to a food shop. Hence, this article is several days overdue.

While I appreciate the gestures and goodwill of Team Prada, their good intentions do nothing to remedy the reality for anyone on the ground. My mind reels back to my work covering the relief efforts in Haiti as those affected by the 2010 earthquake were given solar ovens instead of shelter. The plethora of solar ovens became such an ecological blight on the country that another NGO was established specifically to go over to Haiti to recuperate the most useless and unused solar ovens that served no purpose since Haitians cook on top of the fire and not in an oven. Here in Italy, we were given rhetorical solar ovens where nothing we needed was offered, and nothing that was offered was needed. The disconnect of Italy’s disaster relief network went to new levels of what I call “dumb and dumber.”

Despite all the questions about our losses, I underscored with Team Prada that getting furniture was not a priority—it wasn’t even a consideration at this point. What I did make abundantly clear is that because we lived in a remote part of the country, transportation was not only a necessity, it was vital to our survival in order to buy groceries and move about. Within less than a day after a series of visits from various actors within Team Prada I realised that we would be left stuck in the countryside without a car or any transportation for months. It was also painfully clear that the mismanagement of the Civil Protection was in part due to the fact that the only way this branch could recruit volunteers was to find people who wouldn’t find working too labourious or strenuous. Hence, this corps was mostly composed of the managerial elite class who steadily streamed over to our home, clipboards in hand as they took notes, asking questions. Rarely were any of these folks able to do any practical work or offer any real solutions. Social workers abounded within this network and they followed suit with similar questions but zero solutions. Platitudes dominated the discourse as everyone within Team Prada wanted to be a manager while nobody wanted to actually realise the actions necessary to justify the linguistic storefront window.

We were ultimately saved by kind neighbours and grassroots networks that brought over fresh fruit and vegetables and other edible food in addition to teams of people who came over on their days off to help clean and clean and clean. It was overwhelmingly people from Italy’s working class who saved our lives, not Team Prada. One woman who worked in a supermarket full-time came over and worked two full days with her teenage daughter. I know the work of supermarkets and she made such a sacrifice of time and energy graciously cleaning off our household possessions a dozen times oftens. I was in awe of the solidarity that she and many others demonstrated. Without these folks my family and I would be homeless at this moment. Where the managerial class of Italy’s Civil Protection sought to recreate white collar labour within disaster relief ultimately proving itself to be an utter failure in terms of action, it was the working class that demonstrated that while notes and questions might have good intentions behind them, the only thing that matters when you have just been through such devastation are actions and edible food.

Over these past weeks, I have seen such amazing solidarity from people in the area where I live that my spirits and hopes for our humanity suddenly leapt. To be fair, they didn’t have far to leap given the fact that we are currently in the throes of “Pride Month” where many of “my people” are advancing some of the most regressive nonsense dressed up as “progressivism” as the fiction of gender identity promotes the most homophobic and misogynist narratives any of us have witnessed in our lifetimes. Indeed, Archie Bunker’s ageless “Go out and get me a beer, Edith” seems positively feminist by comparison as is his reception of the Gay Liberation Front at the Bunker doorstep.

While floods were washing away our homes, roads, and automobiles, Oxfam was toiling away to awoken the Global South, such as its latest publicity narrated by a woman with a Desi accent who informs us that the alphabet soup is at risk today, not the almost 8,000 women murdered a year in India. But who cares about silly, menstruating women when you can have the non-messy types of “women”—men—who are the real victims in a country where femicide is rife, and homophobia just as much.

Who would have thought that a massive flood would have given me respite from this subject! But it did.

I haven’t collected my thoughts entirely on what I have just been through, as my family and I were trapped in the upper floor of our home for three days, our children petrified and eating fruit and yogurt. I didn’t eat to ensure my children had food. Meanwhile, my bronchitis worsened and my son’s breathing became compromised. We were finally rescued three days later by a wonderful team of firefighters from Siena after which we were admitted to the hospital where we spent four days. We left the hospital almost three weeks ago to find that the world hadn’t changed. Nor had the political lies.

Since the flooding on 16-17 May, the Italian government has firmly blamed climate change, but that’s a riff on a similar lie the previous Italian government spun during its anti-science theatre of lockdown which imprisoned us in a nightmare of in and out of all sorts of lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates which lasted approximately three years. In 2020 we were told if we didn’t imprison ourselves that we were “killing granny” and today we are told that climate change is the culprit. However, the facts on the ground together with some frank-talking experts reveal another reality entirely.

To those who criticise the global warming skeptics, the flooding in northern Italy will be legitimate ammunition for these folks to use against a government that has blamed the flooding that has displaced 36,000 people and killed 14 on climate change. The reason for the breaking of 23 rivers, which caused the flooding of the region and approximately 300 landslides according to authorities in the region, comes down to poor river maintenance and not simply climate change.

“If a river bank breaks, it has nothing to do with climate change. It’s a problem of maintenance,” Paride Antolini, president of the Geological Society in Emilia-Romagna, elaborated. He continued to detail a specific scene of what went wrong, beginning with specific river management strategies in Italy’s Apennine Mountains. Where normally melting snow from the Dolomites Alps and Apennines would furnish a steady flow of water in spring and summer to feed lakes and nourish farmland, this area of Italy experienced 6 months of rain within 36 hours. The deluge of rain coupled with the years of regional drought have created impermeable soil which resulted in excessive runoff from the bursting riverbanks that had fallen prey to the effects of drought and where there has been little to no vegetation growth to reinforce the banks.

Civil Protection Minister Nello Musumeci also noted how “Soil that remains dry for a long time ends up becoming cemented, drastically limiting its capacity to absorb water.” Musumeci goes on to note how no regional dams had been built for 40 years, and given the drastic meteorological changes, a new approach to hydraulic engineering was needed. Mauro Rossi, a scientist at the Research Institute for Geo-Hydrological Protection, also commented on this phenomenon whereby “rising temperatures intensify drought episodes, drying up the soil and changing its permeability in different ways” leaves the region vulnerable to flooding and landslides in moments of excessive precipitation.

Antolini gives a more expansive analysis of the situation in Emilia Romagna:

The type of rocks and soils of which our hills and mountains are made, generally soft rocks, not those massive limestones or granite stones that we can find in other regions. These characteristics, together with the nature of the slopes, make our hills quite fragile from this point of view. We are now facing an exceptional event but landslides on our mountains are recurring with these intended and repeated rainfall.

Antolini goes on to note how the storms that devastated the region are now starting to repeat themselves around the country several times a year “in some areas now every six months.” He notes:

A new strategy is therefore needed, new decision-making processes but also behavioural ones, something that affects everyone: citizens, administrations, politics. It is not a problem that can be solved overnight, nor in a few years. Much more is needed in such an urbanised area. With homes and industrial centres covering almost the entire plain, the margins of intervention are small and even delicate.

Noting how the biggest problems are in the Po Valley, a densely populated area Antolini observes, “The homes and industrial areas are almost all crossed by rivers and streams. It is a reclaimed plain, so the risk of flooding from Bologna to Riccione is real.” Noting the challenge to geologists who are used to “evaluating climate change over the course of millennia or centuries, rather than over a few decades,” Antolini summarises the situation for the future: “We need to reflect on what is happening. It is a rainfall that finds us unprepared—we do what we can but such conditions were not expected. I am speaking from Cesena, anyone who looks at the images cannot find the words.”

Until this past Sunday, the town of Conselice had been inundated by black water where many of the city’s residents were given tetanus vaccines since the flood water contained sewage. In speaking with the city’s communications office, I was able to ascertain that fortunately there were no reported cases of tetanus and the flood waters have abated.

Many are not out of danger, however, as there is a fierce game at play as to why everything was so badly mismanaged. The scientists at the World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group which analyses the links between extreme weather events and global warming, claim that climate change is not necessarily to blame. The WWA study notes that “of the 19 models used, none of them show a significant likelihood or intensity of such an event to occur.” The study suggests “that in contrast to most parts of the world, there is indeed no detectable increase in heavy rainfall in the Emilia-Romagna region in spring.” The study's findings affirmed earlier research that concluded that “with human-induced climate change, the number of low-pressure systems in the Mediterranean has decreased. This leads to a reduction in heavy rainfall, offsetting the expected increase in heavy rain from global warming.”

Many experts agree that the role of geologists and engineers must adapt to the changes of the earth, weather, and the geological reality that makes Emilia Romagna particularly challenging. Meanwhile some politicians like the mayor of Ravenna, Michele De Pascale, are deflecting blame onto environmentalists whom he claims to be too invested in saving nutrias, local endangered rodents. My “killing-granny radar” has gone off. Meanwhile, environmentalists have called out the government’s lack of preparation for situations like this, with Italy’s premier environmental association, Legambiente, publishing an open letter to De Pascale on 28 May elaborating a more nuanced argument that places blame evenly between climate change and the river management sector, noting the much repeated criticism experts have detailed regarding the longstanding negligence of river embankments:

As the Secretary of the Po River Basin Authority recalled, not even the ordinary and extraordinary maintenance of the embankments and the management of sediments and riparian vegetation will be sufficient activities in the future, precisely in the light of climate change. The achievement of limit quotas for the height of the embankments is an alarm signal which must lead to a change of approach in the planning which, as always reminded by the Secretary, must be oriented towards the increase of the space available for the diversion of the water, setting back the embankments and creating new floodplains, thus increasing the volumes that can be contained within the embankments but working in terms of surface area, not height. This will require economic efforts, including the one to relocate some settlements, but it is a necessary sacrifice to avoid further crises such as the one that occurred in recent weeks.

The reasons for the flooding will continue to beleaguer public debate for months to come. What renders it all so unbearable from where I am sitting on the only chair not destroyed in my home is this: within two days of the flooding there was government outpouring of support for—wait for it—psychological support for victims of the flooding here. If you have been following the Savage Minds podcast in the years of discussions I have had with experts in and around the COVID-19 pandemic, then that explosion you just heard was my brain.

I am unable to fully express my disgust for what has gone on politically with regards to the flood and its political framing simply because the mere fact that the Italian government recognised psychological ill-health around what is a system of rescue, healthcare, safety and housing hardly requires a psychologist. It most definitely requires some of the aforementioned environmental and geological experts, but psychologists, not so much. What did require psychological support was the affirmative neoliberal push from the left within this country to lock us all up for almost three years in what would be a series of lockdowns, maskings, and forced vaccinations for what was largely a scientific-medical industrial fraud committed upon the most disenfranchised.

The psychological fallout from lockdowns and the various scaremongering tactics that the Italian government has effected upon us has had and will have long-lasting psychological imprints for at least a generation. It’s worth mentioning that last year the Italian government rolled out the “Bonus psicologo” (psychology bonus) that has been a struggle for many people to access since in order to benefit from this, the psychologists have to take part in the programme. Many psychologists have not signed up for this progamme and those who have are fully booked. Still, the media has been less than transparent in covering what is a full-on mental health crisis from the citizens of Italy having been forcefully locked up for years, many of whom still have not left their homes having developed agoraphobia, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and an array of many other mental health effects of lockdown.

The mental health crisis of lockdown has now been averted discursively at least: the flood is a gift to the pseudo-leftist politicians and their mates who can now seek psychological comfort because their BMW was not covered by flood insurance. So much for granny dying because you touched your face during lockdown or didn’t rub elbows with your mates. Who would have guessed that all you had to do to receive state-wide recognition of mental ill-health was to lose your sofa and kitchen! I thought being locked up without the right to leave your home in 2020 without carrying a copy of the Stasi-esque forms declaring your precise destination and motives for leaving your home—forms that changed every day or three that required printing anew on each foray outside—might be reason itself to have psychological support (that is unless you had a dog, in which case you had more rights than those without).

We were inundated with news stories these past weeks about how “psychologists are ready to help those who lost everything” such as this news article. Say what? It’s as if the government here was running PSYOPs (psychological operations) on us once again, wondering when we might break. Certainly, by mid 2023, over three years from this country’s first draconian lockdown, the government might have learned its lesson about how to prioritise human rights in tandem with survival. In 2020, millions of us were trapped inside tiny flats with no way of earning a living, vast sectors of work destroyed by lockdown, with the government years from even considering the psychological effects lockdown would invariably have upon our mental health. Early announcements which speculated about how long lockdown might last from February 2020 focussed upon two primary issues: when football matches would recommence and when people could leave their first home and travel to their second homes.

I wish I were making this up.

We were pummelled with these announcements in the first months of lockdown while the Italian government suspended mortgage payments while no similar relief was offered to renters. It was almost as if the only thing that mattered during lockdown were the upper-middle and upper classes. Now, three plus years later, we are being sent the same messaging but in a far more depraved format: today psychological support is being offered almost immediately in tandem with the flooding precisely because what is recognised as being psychologically imperilling is not the pervasive loss of freedom, but the loss of property.

The cognitive dissonance between what we have been subjected to these past years—the forced incarceration of a population with no recognition whatsoever as to the likely psychological damage that such lockdowns were bound to amass—contrasted with the recent outpouring of “psychological support” due to the loss of material possessions speaks to the perverse Zeitgeist embodying public institutions today. For many watching these political theatres, we discuss why the government has gone on overdrive for what is a far more direct issue of finding citizens safe housing, food, furniture, and transportation. I speak with my many fellow-Italians who are in a similar situation to mine and we are all asking why the focus of psychologists when people are not really traumatised from the flooding. We need money to replace our lost washing machines and cars, not psychotherapy!

I launched Savage Minds almost three years ago after a pitch for a story on the psychological effects of lockdown was rejected by a stream of editors across various left of centre publications. It was daunting to receive emails from editors that stated a version of this: “Interesting story but we couldn’t run this piece because it will look as if we are against lockdowns.” Today it seems that we have come full circle where now every media outlet wants nothing other than to discuss the need for psychological support in the face of a flood while in the background remain the archeological ruins of infinite lies about vaccines, masks, social distancing, reasons to close schools, and the so-called importance of saving the elderly. The flood in Emilia Romagna serves a larger political purpose in transferring the attention of the current mental health crisis plaguing Italy by neatly sweeping it towards “flood victims” who need plumbers and electricians not psychotherapy. In tandem with political bodies, legacy media also trumps up this narrative to make the flooding of Emilia Romagna into a mental healthcare cause du jour.

As I write this article, two retired gentlemen are doing the hard labour of installing a kitchen that grassroots efforts of volunteers and donors was able to deliver. This is the kind of support that we need: donations of money, old kitchens, and labour. That’s it. We don’t need psychologists in the aftermath of the floods of Emilia Romagna but we sure as hell needed them to speak out while all of our society was being locked up for over two years, children masked in schools, my daughter punished by her teacher for hugging her friend, adults forced into taking experimental “vaccines”, people bullied for protesting lockdown mandates, media complying with government mandates as they failed to cover most protests, politicians not observing or even considering Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and much, much more.

I was asked by the Team Prada social worker two weeks ago if I needed any psychological support. I burst out laughing and then told that social worker and her colleague this: “I’d like psychological support for the genius who thought that our losing personal property was a legitimate reason to summons psychological support. Where was this support when we couldn’t take a walk outside our homes for most of 2020 without fear of being arrested?”

Welcome to the Pleasure Dome, folks. We are fully ensnared within capitalism gone amok as western society exaggerates material loss through a perverse contradiction of what materiality means and even its very existence. In one corner, we have the fabrication of a national “mental health crisis” in post-flood Emilia Romagna where people are simply in need of financial and material support. And in the other corner, there is a national denialism of the political pressure applied forcing us to accept lockdowns that has actually resulted in an actual mental health crisis, whose depths are quite daunting, having affected most everyone with whom I speak. And I include myself in this category.

We are in dire straits as a society as political bodies compel us to ignore material reality and deny basic science when it matters, while perversely exaggerating the importance of material reality when it doesn’t. We are now on day 7 of what is already a gruelling Pride month as we are being pushed towards a full-on embrace of fictional identities of men who LARP as women and women who demonstrate their “gender dysphoria” by growing beards and giving birth “as men.” Up is down, environmentalists cause flooding, and lockdowns are now being shoved to the back of the shelf of history as legacy media labours to convince its readers that lost furniture and home appliances are the raison d’être for nervous breakdowns.

Instead, it’s time we started asking questions about why this country has allocated funds to help the rentier class first and foremost—not the renting class, the most disadvantaged of Italy’s population. As I recently discovered, if Italians landlords do not sign off on a form where they renounce these funds, then renters get nothing. Zero. Nada. Zilch. I wrote my mayor to protest what is clearly elitism and the bailout of the wealthiest and she wrote back that “unfortunately we cannot intervene in any way since it is a private matter that will have to be resolved between you.” This is Italy’s Wall Street bailout!

In what I can only describe as a brilliant, Machiavellian move on the part of the government of Emilia Romagna and its ostensibly leftist leaders, Stefano Bonaccini (president) and Irene Priolo (vice-president) have thrown the people a bag of rice and let them fight over it. Only in this case, they have tied the hands of the renting class allowing wealthy landowners to scoop up public funds for themselves as they avert their gaze, classifying the starving as a “private matter.” It’s also a cynical move given that in Italian the term “landlord” (padrone di casa) still maintains as close an allegiance to its medieval relationship to wealth and as it does today: many landowners still view themselves as patriarchs of the poor, we their property. And who can blame them when the Italian state has just handed its landowning class given complete control over what funds “the little people” are allowed. It’s clear the only lesson this government learned from its handling of the pandemic was how far it could go in silencing dissent with the full participation of the nation’s legacy media.

While it is astonishing to witness Italians’ submission to authority since Lockdown, it’s also somewhat understandable. This country is known for its widespread use of the police to silence democratic dissent within journalism especially. Italy is one of many European nations where defamation is not only a criminal offence, but it can also carry a prison sentence. This means that false claims of defamation are ritually weaponised to silence media criticism with on average 6,000 defamation lawsuits filed annually against journalists. In 2017, however, there were almost 9,500 defamation proceedings initiated against journalists. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni also filed defamation suit last autumn against the journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi and his editor, Stefano Feltri, of the newspaper Domani. Meloni took issue with Fittipaldi's article in Domani regarding an inquiry into the purchase of masks by the government's Covid-19 commissioner in which Fittipaldi suggested that Meloni helped a friend procure a government contract during the coronavirus pandemic. Both men face up to three years in prison, if convicted.

It is no wonder when I scanned the news for other stories like mine of the rentier class controlling flood relief funds that I found no news stories on this subject. It is even less of a wonder that when I reached out to my colleagues in Italian media regarding the diversion of public funds for flood victims from those most in need to the wealthiest, that so far no journalists have answered my public appeal to cover this topic. They know what side their bread is buttered.

In the meantime, I was forced to launch a crowdfunding campaign because eating is not an option for my family, nor is living in the middle of the countryside with zero transportation.

Given that today we are told up is down, that lesbians have penises, and that public taxes in Italy are used to bail out the landowning class to the disenfranchisement of the poor, I fear that at the end of this culture and media war for veracity—or at the very least honesty—the greatest victim will not only be the truth, but also her companion: our collective mental sanity.