On Friday, January 17th, we find ourselves in a new location, the current home of our tour guide Alessio, Fontecchio, Italy. Fontecchio is a very small town with no more than roughly 400 people. We spent the day off venturing into a neighboring city roughly 30 minutes away named L’Aquila. L’Aquila is a city with 72,800 inhabitants, 700 meters above sea level with a sub-Alpine climate, 116 km from Rome, and in a region of recurrent Earthquakes. On the night of April 6th, 2009, a magnitude 6.3 Earthquake struck L'Aquila, killing 308 people, causing severe damage to 100,000 buildings, and leaving 67,500 people homeless. This earthquake was an absolutely devastating event to hit this city, and the city is still working on coming back from this tragedy.
We first went and visited the Basilica di Santa Maria di Collemaggio which began restoration in 2015 and took two years to be fully restored. Due to this earthquake, two of the largest columns completely collapsed into pieces along with the area just before the altar completely collapsing. One interesting note for this restoration is that they salvaged all the old material, or as much as possible, and reused this material in the restoration process.
After this we visited a couple other sites in L’Aquila which are still going through the restoration process some 10 years later! At these sites we were able to walk through the construction site and see all the progress that is being made. Also, in order to work on preventing such devastation from any future earthquake, the contractors use these iron poles that run all throughout the building to provide more structural support.
In our readings of this catastrophic event, we learned of the political significance and measures taken after this event. For 2 months following the earthquake, there were more emergency vehicles than cars or trucks on the streets. Also with so many people going homeless, one third of homeless survivors were placed in 171 tent camps, one third in hotels on the Abruzzo coast, and one third found their own accommodation. During this time, the government built new homes (urbanized the region again with longer term housing), and between September 29, 2009 and February 19, 2010, 15,000 people were accommodated in 184 buildings. The homes were built on unstable waste dumps though and did not have adequate waste water treatment in order to save money. This leads into the corruptness that is rumored to be involved in the government of this region especially. On December 30th, 2009, the Italian government passed Decree Law No. 195, which essentially stated that the civil protection program would be privatived into a single holding company. Much controversy ensued in the months following when it was found that the government had passing roughly 600 ordinances over the course of the past 7 years leading up to this event. In the 7 years prior, roughly 1-2 ordinances were passed a year. The purpose of government ordinances is to “provide the legal means to spend money and govern situations in times of emergency and crisis”, but these ordinances had been used for many different purposes that were not connected with either civil protection or emergency management. In the end, this tragic earthquake, privatization of civil protections, and ordinance scandals has continued to drag Italy’s civil protection system into a political free for all and essentially left it there.
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