Six years have already passed since the Vaia storm.
Six years after the Vaia storm: “I remember the tears of tension, the physical and emotional fatigue”
It was 2018 when a violent storm hit the entire Belluno area, but especially in the upper part of the province, devastating and making entire territories unrecognizable.
“Six years ago at this very hour we had to make the most difficult and serious decisions in the recent history of the Belluno area. Complete closures of schools and factories like never before. But those decisions, the result of a chain that started from weather forecasts and reached the Prefecture and individual mayors, served to save human lives – he writes in a note the president of the Province Roberto Padrin – I remember those excited hours in the CCS operations room. I remember the phone calls, the reports of damage that increased by the minute, the wait for weather updates. I remember the tense faces in front of the computers, the long hours of anxiety. I remember the tears of tension, the physical and emotional fatigue, someone who brought food to the technicians who spent nights and days without stopping. I remember that everyone did their duty, feeling part of a complex organism and helping their neighbor to “bring home” the most difficult and tormented night ever.”
Six years later, Padrin continues, it is possible to read the Vaia storm with more detachment and therefore with greater depth of analysis. And say “what what happened at the end of October 2018 was a huge opportunity. An opportunity to rethink our territory and the relationship between man and the surrounding environment”. An opportunity for great cohesion, restart, and work. All together with the aim of putting a wounded land back together. An opportunity to understand once again how important teamwork is.
“Without Vaia, perhaps, we would not have intervened so promptly in so many points of our territory that deserved care and attention. Because it is true that it was necessary to rebuild and heal the wounds. But it is equally true that, thanks to the commissioner structure of the Veneto Region and the various implementing bodies, decisive works have been carried out to prevent further damage from recurring, and interventions have been implemented to mitigate the risk of landslides and floods”.
Vaia was the collapse of the house in Ponte Mas, but also the reconstruction of the regional road in Candaten, to name two symbolic cases. Was the electricity and water blackout in upper Agordinobut also the solidarity of those who brought food and water to the most isolated hamlets in the days immediately following the disaster. Was the forest of Val Visdende razed to the ground, but also the replanting of thousands of trees. It was the destruction of the Serrai di Sottoguda, but also the rebirth, six years later, of one of the most iconic and evocative sites in the Belluno Dolomites.
Bottacin
“Presiding over the region’s crisis unit during Vaia – he recalls the regional councilor Gianpaolo Bottacin – meant for me making heart-shaking decisions, such as shutting down everything in Belluno based on the weather forecast from our Regional Environmental Protection Agency (Arpav) or having entire cities evacuated or not. They were particularly intense and complex days that I experienced sleeping two hours a night when it was fine. The Veneto Civil Protection system, on which I had spent so much energy up to that point, managed to give a rapid and effective responseso much so as to deserve the applause of the President of the Republic Mattarella who on 12 March 2019 in Belluno declared that the Veneto PC system, on the occasion of Vaia, had taught the whole country a lesson”.
After Vaia, 2527 construction sites were activated for over one billion euros of funds invested for the mitigation of hydrogeological risk.
“At this point we are a model. But it wasn’t a walk in the park – concludes Bottacin – Carrying out works for the defense of the soil is an uphill journey between bureaucratic complexities determined by environmental impact assessments, landscape authorisations, expropriations and much more on the one hand and protests, appeals and even threats from part of committees, associations and even administrations on the other. Often all these obstacles are not perceived by the population but I can assure you that they have severely tested my determination. But without scratching it.”
