They had returned to the reclaimed sites to spill and set fires again. In recent days the Carabinieri arrested a sixty-year-old criminal who had set fire to twenty bags of waste of various kinds, left inside the Vesuvius National Park by three other people between the end of April and the beginning of May, throwing an explosive device from their car. There is no peace for the Land of Fires, where the Pope goes on the 23rd of this month to meet families affected by bereavement and illness.
Pope Leo meets the families of the Land of Fires in Acerra: «Our son was killed by pollution»
«His visit is very important», he comments General Sergio Costa, who as provincial commander of Naples of the Forestry Corps, then Forestry Carabinieri, was the first to uncover the scandal of buried waste and open-air landfills. «He has already been to Pompeii and Naples and could have mentioned them during these visits. Instead he decided to come specifically. And to do it ad Acerra which was the mother of all attacks on the environment, with the Calabricito landfill and the dioxin that spread in the early 2000s”, adds the former Minister of the Environment and currently vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies. «I believe that Leo
Did the major investigations start precisely from the requests of the parish priests?
“Yes. I had recently arrived in Campania from Basilicata and Don Maurizio Patriciello, with a series of associations, parishes and committees, asked me for an appointment. They also arrive with some mothers who had lost their children and with environmental doctors and they explain the situation to me in a very heartfelt way. I knew a little about it, but I had never faced it directly. It was a very strong incentive to hear these mothers talk about their ferocious pain. However, I also wondered where the vulnus was since other investigators before me had found nothing.”
And how did he act?
«I built a completely different investigative dynamic. Instead of starting from the stories of the repentants, I used a scientific technique of analyzing the territory. There is the so-called magnetic constant of the earth’s crust. This is a value that changes from area to area, but which remains constant in a given area. If, when analyzing that sector, the value is not what it should be, it means that something is wrong. At the same time I cross-referenced this data with that of aerophotogrammetry, that is, photographs taken by planes flying over Italian territory to verify the state of forests, woods, waters, etc. By comparing those of the last 20-30 years and crossing them with the magnetic fields we have verified major alterations. We were supported by the Institute of Biophysics and Volcanology, we discussed with the magistrates, and only later, with such a solid scientific basis, we began to question the justice collaborators who had carried out activities for the Casalesi clan. Everywhere we dug, identifying places with this method, we found buried waste.”
What years are we talking about?
«We are around 2011, but the movement had started before, since 2000. And then in 2013 there was the great demonstration of 100 thousand who took to the streets without political flags to ask for land reclamation. We found one dump a week. The situation was very serious.”
What kind of waste was there?
«We must distinguish between the buried ones, the semi-buried landfills and the open-air ones. In those graves we almost always found tannery processing sludge, it is the most aggressive waste classified as “specially dangerous”, i.e. harmful to people’s health. And then tarry substances derived from petroleum in the drums used, for example, for washing ships, chemical reagents disposed of by intermediate processing companies of a product, paints, solvents, even crumbled asbestos, the most dangerous. A concrete slab with walls was laid over these graved trunks to give consistency to the landfill and then a layer of soft earth was placed on top. Walking on it you couldn’t notice anything. This method was indicative of a real criminal organization like that of the Casalesi.”
And the other landfills?
«There are less structured organizations there, sometimes even private citizens who throw away waste from illegal activities. We also found glues, fabrics and leather from non-compliant textile businesses. Tires or mattresses are then thrown onto this waste and set on fire. The reason for the fires is both to reduce the volume of waste in order to throw away more and to prevent tracing its origin.”
Is this a continuing system?
«When the bubble burst and media attention increased, when the arrests began, the routes moved partly towards Puglia, partly to Calabria and partly abroad. Puglia has flat terrain and is certainly more comfortable. Landfill methods have also changed. Investigations must intercept companies that work illegally. Today the laws exist, eco-criminals have been recognised, and we need sales and production data, the volumes of waste produced and the taxes paid.”
Then there is the chapter of reclamation. Where are we at?
«As a minister I supported the so-called Vadalà law, i.e. the law that allowed my colleague Giuseppe Vadalà, as extraordinary commissioner, to lead a public administration structure that is intervening in an area that includes 92 municipalities and one and a half million inhabitants. The process started in 2020 and it will take ten years to secure the area. Safety which does not only mean cleaning up, but also stopping polluting. And not just in the Land of Fires. The risks are very high. We must be careful to avoid the Apulian front, the Calabrian front, etc. opening up afterwards. There are technical times and in the meantime we need to be vigilant.”
While waiting for reclamation, people continue to die.
«In fact, the issue is not only that of reclamation, but also of screening. If in the rest of Italy preventive tests are done free of charge after the age of 50, for example, for breast cancer, here where you get sick around the age of 22, 23, you have to take them in advance. Obviously it applies to the throat, to the lungs, to the pancreas. Until everything is made safe, we must rely on the clusters reported by general practitioners even on non-tumor pathologies, for example asthma, which has a very high incidence in those areas, and intervene accordingly.”
