Experts warn of new landslides in southern Italy

Experts say Italy faces new landslides in inhabited areas after the forced evacuation of thousands from two southern towns earlier this month.

"Italy will always have landslides," geologist Leonello Serva said. "What is not acceptable for a wealthy country is to have a landslide blocking a highway, hitting a bridge or a hospital."The density of populations in at-risk areas and a lack of awareness about geological risks both contribute to the recurring catastrophes, experts agree.

Torrential rains in southern Italy caused landslides that led thousands of people to flee the towns of Maierato in Calabria and San Fratello in Sicily.

Sicily Governor Raffaele Lombardo said on Italian television that Sicily was especially at risk "because of the extraordinary rainfalls, the geological fragility of the land, and because for 40, 50, 100 years people have built houses on land that is subject to landslides."

Ispra, a public research institute that monitors areas at geological risk, classifies about five percent of Italy's territory at the highest risk for landslides.

It has recorded 470,000 landslide events in Italy over the last 50 years.

Mr Serva, who heads Ispra's land protection section, says that in Italy, landslides "can be expected anywhere there is a slope," since the soil on Italy's innumerable hills and mountains is "young in geological terms."

But the southern regions of Campania, Calabria and Sicily are the most likely to experience landslides, he said.

In October, dozens of people died in a mudslide near the city of Messina in Sicily. A worse disaster occurred in 1998, when the town of Sarno, outside Naples, was engulfed by two million metric cubes of mud, killing 160 people and destroying nearly 200 homes.

Francesco Dramis, a professor of geomorphology at Roma 3 University, said that lack of awareness of land-use regulation was a serious problem in Italy.

Urging "education on the correct use of land and legality," Mr Dramis said: "If I illegally dump water on the land, I can cause major effects."

Mr Serva also noted that safe practices in building, vegetation maintenance and ploughing that are overlooked or forgotten worsen the geological situation.

"We are losing this culture of the land. Before there were many more farmers that knew these kinds of things," he said.

Early on Friday, as the inhabitants of Maierato and San Fratello still waited to return home, part of Italy's main southern highway remained closed because of landslide risk.

"We have landslides in Italy," Mr Dramis said. "We should just keep away from them."