Enna, 22th April
Here in Sicily, we’re well prepared. We grew up in a place where it’s almost normal to regularly not have running water in our homes. Only recently, in the best-served areas, have we started to see 24-hour continuous distribution.
This probably sounds strange for those who are used to always having running water —like in the rest of Europe— but in the vast majority of rural areas, especially in central and southern Sicily, tap water is still rationed.
That’s why we’ve learnt how to manage this situation on our own, buying water tanks to store water for when the municipal supply doesn’t arrive. I, for instance, have a 1000-liter tank at home.
I’m over 60, and I remember that even as a child, water in summer was never something you could count on. We’d fill the house with containers, use the bathtub as a reservoir, and there were buckets everywhere.
And this still happens today. The water from the washing machine is saved to flush the toilet. A bucket is kept in the shower to collect the water that runs while you wait for it to heat up. I’ve even seen systems that monitor tank levels via an app, so you always know how much water you have left.
Here, it’s like we’re all star students who listened to the school ecology lesson and put it perfectly into practice. Not a drop is wasted —but it’s forced sustainability. It’s down to survival rather than virtue.
Even with all this preparation, we struggled enormously during last year’s long drought, which lasted nearly ten months.
There were times when no water came out of the taps for six consecutive days, and you had to make do solely with what was in the tanks for all that time. Organizing everything was incredibly hard.
There’s also the issue of quality: the water in the tanks isn’t the same as the water from the tap —tanks accumulate residue, they get dirty, they turn muddy.
We had to use an enormous number of bottles of water for cooking, with costs that were astronomical. And to add insult to injury, we live in the region with the most expensive water in Italy: a cubic meter can cost up to 4 euros. Some people were paying bills of 1,000 to 1,500 euros.
In some areas, like the city of Caltanissetta, water tanks had to be brought in by trucks. Some neighbourhoods were without water for over 110 days, including schools, hospitals, and public buildings.
People queued in the streets, standing for hours with their jerry cans in the summer heat. And sometimes, the water would run out before everyone had their share, leading to tension and arguments: “Why do you have more containers than me?”, “How many are you taking?”. In the town of Troina, residents even went as far as occupying the water treatment plant.
There are two main causes for all this. First: the complete inefficiency of the Sicilian water system. Billions have been spent on dams that don’t work, and the distribution network is riddled with leaks.
The second cause is climate change. Sicily’s geographic position makes it an extremely sensitive land. The Sahara is just 200 kilometers away as the crow flies. It’s close —very close— and its impact reaches us very quickly. Last year, we had eight months of thermal anomalies, with temperatures well above average. That meant extremely high evaporation rates, and the land dried out.
And even when it does rain, the precipitation is patchy. Some parts of Sicily received the amount of rain that usually falls in two years, in a single month, and while just 50 kilometers away, not a single drop fell in my area. The rain we’ve had in Sicily over the past few weeks hasn’t solved our problem.
Two years ago, severe drought hit Northern Italy, the Po River was nearly dry. Just a few days ago, a new alert was issued for the Dolomite area, where the glaciers have dropped below their minimum threshold.
The problem is that people forget quickly. Climate change shouldn’t be thought of as, “Oh, it’s getting hotter,” but as, “Oh, now the climate is something else entirely.” And we’re living in it.
