Landslides turn Amalfi Coast deadly as Italy sits tight

When health inspector Raffaele Mansi dropped off his daughter at her barista job in a tiny town on Italy's Amalfi Coast, he could hardly imagine that an hour later she would be swept out from behind the café's counter by a massive torrent of mud and lost to him forever.

"She had graduated from university, spoke four languages and had come back home for the summer to save money to go abroad," said Mansi, standing outside where he last saw her. "Everyone told me they'd never find her body, but I didn't give up hope." 

Twenty-three days after the September 2010 mudslide, the body of 26-year-old Francesca Mansi was found off the coast of the Sicilian island of Lipari, 240 kilometres to the south.

The Amalfi Coast has long been a mecca for writers, movie stars and honeymooners. Gore Vidal wrote in a sumptuous villa perched high in the town of Ravello. D.H. Lawrence and Richard Wagner found inspiration here. Greta Garbo took refuge in its hills.

While the vistas are stunning and the cuisine divine, a growing danger lurks along this exquisite stretch of Mediterranean coastline.

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Climate change has brought more frequent bursts of torrential rainfall, like the one that triggered the mudslide that killed Francesca Mansi.

Yet, Italy's leading geologists say, investment in preventing natural disasters in this UNESCO heritage site is woefully lacking.

This month they met on the Amalfi Coast to try to draw attention to the danger.

"Addressing geological risks just isn't a priority in Italy… Our government does virtually nothing to monitor the situation and educate people on how to respond," says Francesco Peduto, president of the National Council of Geologists.

"That's despite the fact that geological risks are the highest in Italy of all of Europe." 

Seventy per cent of all recorded landslides in Europe are in Italy – more than 500,000 out of 700,000, in a country already at high risk of earthquakes and volcanic activity.

In the rugged hills behind the towns along the Amalfi Coast, signs of erosion and neglect pockmark the terrain. At lower heights, the famed Amalfi lemon trees grow on terraces secured by stone retaining walls. But many have been abandoned as too labour-intensive and costly to maintain. Once a bulwark against erosion, the walls are crumbling.

Further up the hills, large swaths of clear-cut land scar the slopes. A century ago, they were thick with oak trees, each one planted by a family when a girl was born and felled 18 years later for her dowry. Today, local farmers plant skinny beech trees used for plywood, which they clear-cut every five years — a dangerous contributor to mudslides.

Costly disasters

In the past 50 years, the Italian government has spent, on average, about €3 billion a year (more than $4 billion Cdn) responding to natural disasters, including dozens of mudslides. The geologists who met in Amalfi this month say emergency spending could be dramatically cut only if Italy began investing in prevention.

Besides, anyone who has lived in an area affected by an earthquake, landslide or flood will tell you lavish government spending in the aftermath hardly resolves the mess. Price inflation and corruption in the wake of natural disasters have a long, well-documented history in Italy.

The most glaring recent example is the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila that killed 308 and left 65,000 people homeless. In a now infamous wiretapped cellphone conversation just minutes after the earthquake hit, two construction entrepreneurs erupted into laughter, saying, "We have to start full throttle. There's not an earthquake every day!"

Later, they were found guilty of bribing officials in the Italian Civil Defence agency to win public tenders.

But in the meantime, construction did start "full throttle," and much of it was shoddy. This month, on the seven-year anniversary of the earthquake, Italian papers published the latest photo of a collapsed balcony on the supposedly seismic-proof houses built in l'Aquila's "new town" after the quake.

Training lacking

Just as problematic as the spending choices of the Italian government is the lack of education about risks and disaster response.  

Geologist Peduto and others say Italians are shockingly ignorant about how to respond to floods and mudslides. Given the volatile nature of Italy's geography, geologists say safety and response strategies should be core curriculum in schools.

With mudslides, Peduto says, 50 per cent of victims die due to their ignorance of what to do. He cited three men who "who died like mice" in the Genoa mudslides and floods of 2011 after locking themselves inside a cellar.

Many residents of the Amalfi Coast, 80 per cent of which is on mid- to high-level alert for landslides, simply trust they'll be all right in case of a disaster.

"I feel safe here because fortunately nothing has ever happened," café owner Maria Grazia says.

When asked if any of the structures in her town, including the school her two children attend, have been certified to withstand floods and mudslides, she said, "I hope so. Yes, I think so. Yes, certainly."

None of the buildings has.

'Battle for civilization'

If Andrea Reale, the energetic, loud-talking mayor of Minori, gets his way, within the next few years, residents will become "expert citizens" on both prevention of and reaction to landslides.

He's in the process of hatching a new urban plan not just for his town, but for the whole Amalfi Coast. It will include a system to better alert residents to the risk of mudslides and floods, incentives to improve lemon terrace maintenance and bylaws to limit clear-cutting.

"I consider this a battle for civilization," Reale said, "of teaching people to think collectively."

But even if the plan is approved by geologists and disaster management agencies, Italy's national government won't necessarily fund it.

Raffaele Mansi says he backs Reale's initiative, but experience has made him wary. Since his daughter Francesca's death, there has been a lot of talk, he says. But he can't think of one significant change that's made these coastal towns safer.

"Doing nothing to prevent or prepare for these disasters is our collective tragedy," he says, looking out past the small port where his daughter was carried away. "Francesca's death has been a terrible loss, but if things improved, I would say it served a purpose."