Umbria five years after the earthquake, “reconstruction is still a project”

Umbria five years after the earthquake, “reconstruction is still a project”

The symbolic image of those tremors is the Basilica of Norcia. The church partially collapsed, the village cordoned off. The smaller towns that cannot be reached, the rubble of the historic centers. Between 26 October and the first days of November there were tremors felt everywhere between Umbria and the Marches.

The strongest on October 30 of magnitude 6.5 with the epicenter between the municipalities of Norcia and Preci, in the province of Perugia. At that moment the Basilica collapsed. The project to rebuild it will be presented on Saturday morning. The key word is still project, as with many other buildings and other centers. Castelluccio di Norcia collapsed almost entirely on the same day. It should be rebuilt, starting in 2022, on seismic isolators, movable plates that should prevent collapses in the event of new tremors.

He had been there ten weeks ago the disaster of Amatrice and Accumoli, with hundreds of deaths. Fewer lives were lost in the aftershocks between October and November, but towns and cities were equally destroyed. An economy that was mainly agricultural and tourism has come to a halt and which is still partly at a standstill also due to the pandemic. The historic center of Camerino it is defined as a desert by those who still live there. The reconstruction, which has yet to go through demolitions in many cases, has not started.

Flavia Giombetti of the Central Italy Earthquake Coordination told Vanity Fair of an unchanged situation already two years ago. “The reconstruction didn’t start at all. They have been three years of detention with rules that are overlapping, “he said. These are the words that also return on the fifth anniversary.

From the province of Macerata, one of the places most affected by the second seismic swarm, comes the story of Amalia Arpini, 58 years old, who, with her husband Sebastiano and daughter Katia, runs the farm and agritourism The Sodere in the valleys of the Sibillini Mountains in Belforte del Chienti. It is an organic farm where spelled, lentils and vegetables are grown. Oil is produced and animals are raised.

«The problems arising from the earthquake are so great that a single intervention cannot solve them with Breed hope we harvest with the aim of creating fences to bring the cattle to pasture ”, says Amalia. Raise Hope +, is the new phase of the Alleva la Hope campaign, launched at the end of June by Legambiente and Enel and active on the Planbee.bz platform. It is a form of crowdfunding which aims to help farmers, companies and tourist facilities, local businesses.

Until the November 30 it is possible to support the four beneficiaries, Amalia Arpini, Enrico Foglietti, Marta Gianpiccolo and Jean Luc Furore, helping them to carry out their rebirth project. These are small goals that want to become pieces of reconstruction. The donations that will arrive through PlanBee.bz will be joined by those from Enel and Legambiente. In three years, 16 companies have been helped.

Small steps, but the rest is missing. «If you go around the affected regions», says Amalia Arpini, «it is not that many things have been done. The only thing that is not lacking is bureaucracy “. The earthquake damaged the barn and collapsed a warehouse in his company. The work is restarted by a tensile structure given by the Region, even if it is not ideal for animals. Five years after the earthquake, his thoughts are unable to go to the future. “I can only look at the present.”

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