Water crisis in Sicily: here are all the culprits (spoiler, we’re here too!)

This article on the water crisis is published in issue 32-33 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until August 13, 2024.

The Chinese found water in the dark side of the Moon. We lose it in the bright side. Palermo crowns the drought of the whole of Sicily – followed, by the common disease of thirst, by the rest of the South – where the tankers of the Navy must arrive to supply the tankers with drinking waterwith all the predictable racket of transport, blackmail and inconveniences to follow. It also happens in Caltanissetta, in Gela, in the Agrigento area, besieged by the lack of water and in dozens of inland villages where it arrives rationed or even worse at the fountain in the square for a few hours a day with queues of women and children for supplies, like in the short stories of Pirandello and Verga from another century, their protagonists overcome by poverty and always by resignation.

The cultivated fields are dry, the irrigation basins are dry, 23 out of 46 dams are not working. Like in Calabria and Puglia. A film already seen a hundred times, more or less since the newspapers that in the summer chronicles denounce the improvidence of the administrations, the network of aqueducts riddled with holes like disposable fountains, have existed. With the record of the water crisis is right in Sicily, where at least half of the water is lost due to poor or absent maintenance. And where the 12 desalination plants built in the last decades – which work in Israel, Arab countries and even African ones – they are broken or closedpoorly built and worse, guarded by entire generations of politicians, public bodies, technical bodies, who manage their salaries very well, but treat water like fires, in an emergency, with siren-wailing promises. In addition to the cheek of the penultimate governor of Sicily, Nello Musumeci, who was even promoted to minister, who, faced with the ongoing catastrophe, uses the prose of a student in his third year of middle school: “We believed that water was inexhaustible, we wasted it, now it’s taking revenge”. But we believed who?

Not to mention the formidable Daniela Santanchè who, despite the investigations concerning her for aggravated fraud and bankruptcy, has not yet gone to hide in the law firms of her defenders, but is the Minister of Tourism and has the courage to rebuke the New York Timesguilty of having published an investigation precisely on the drought in Southern Italy adding, she says, “damage to damage”. Revealing that what worries her is not the damage inflicted on the population suffering from thirst, on the livestock and on the crops that are going to ruin. Even less so on water, a common good to be protected. But the accounting one of Tourism, which risks a crisis in attendance and therefore in takings, discouraged by the alarms. Ignoring that It is precisely this crooked political hierarchy of resources and the cultural one of priorities that is draining the water from our territories, with the blissful complicity of the infamous average Italian, that is, all of usthat we consume 215 litres of water a day, 100 just to shower and brush our teeth.

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