Civil Protection Department

Different types of pollution become a matter for civil protection when environmental risk is connected to the likelihood that an event - caused by a sudden change in the physical and chemical parameters that characterise the environmental water air and soil matrices - occurs with immediate or short term repercussions on the health of the resident population in a given area and such as to involve the adoption of special emergency measures.

 In actual fact, many areas on national territory have experienced or are experiencing situations such as to require urgent prescriptive operations for the protection of public safety. In this sphere, the Department of Civil Protection is increasingly called upon to intervene, and is engaged in complex problems that range from waste to water pollution emergencies, such as the emergency involving the River Lambro, when a refinery in the process of being decommissioned spilled a large quantity of oil, creating numerous problems for the delicate ecosystem of the Po river delta. A state of emergency was declared and a civil protection order issued to deal with the situation of grave risk that had been created.
Furthermore, where land decontamination is concerned, the Department is always involved in the management of SIN - Siti di Interesse Nazionale (sites of national concern) – in other words, the areas identified in relation to site characteristics, to the quantity of and danger posed by pollutants, to the impact on the surrounding environment in terms of health and ecological risk, as well as damage to the cultural and environmental heritage. Legislation on the matter includes laws 462/98 and 388/2000, the Ministerial decree 468/01 and law 179/2002. To date, SINs come to 57 and represent 3% of Italian territory of which 34 % is marine or inland waters, representing approximately 330,000 hectares of marine area. The responsibility in terms of administrative procedures for the SINs falls on MATT - Ministero dell'Ambiente e della Tutela del Territorio (Ministry for the Environment and Protection of the territory), with the support of ISPRA (Institute for Environmental Protection and Research).

The sites/areas of national concern require urgent intervention and involve approximately 316 municipalities in all regions of Italy, with approximately 7 million inhabitants. Furthermore, based on the APAT 2003 annual, the sites/areas of “regional interest” are approximately 12,107 polluted or potentially polluted, of which 4,383 are registered in the “Registry of contaminated sites” (only 382 have been cleaned up).
The scale of the pollution on a spatial level and the quantity of spills in these areas require urgent and costly intervention, which must be tackled through the issue of ad hoc orders.
An example of such an emergency is the decontamination of the Orbetello site, where - given the situation of serious environmental danger - the Ministry for the Environment asked the Ministry for the coordination of Civil protection to adopt an Order in accordance with law no. 22524 of February 1992. This allowed for the implementation of urgent measures to activate the operations necessary to reach objectives set by the Ministry for the Environment technical-scientific commission, pursuant to the judgement of the area as one of high risk for an environmental crisis.
Over recent years, the Department has been engaged in the management of emergencies regarding the bad management of solid urban waste, with attempts made to overcome and manage emergency situations in different Italian regions such as Campania, Calabria and Sicily through civil protection orders.