The landslide of Niscemi, Musumeci: "After 1997, silence fell, it is up to the judiciary to explain why"

"In Niscemi, 150 million have been allocated to manage the waters downstream and demolish the houses that should have been demolished 30 years ago. There is an investigation by the judiciary that is underway to understand who should have intervened in these thirty years and did not." This was stated by Nello Musumeci, the Minister for Civil Protection and Maritime Policies, who is participating in a conference at the University of Messina on "Right to Safety and Civil Protection," which is also attended by the rector Giovanna Spatari.

"If prevention - he continues - is not a priority, we are accompanied by fatalism, resignation, and commonplaces. All of this then leads to the consequences we have known." Then the former governor of Sicily from 2017 to 2022 returns to the landslide of 1997, after which, he says, "the curtain fell, the deafening silence on Niscemi after 2-3 years, already in 2002-2003 it was no longer talked about. Why in 2005 did the technical scientific commission say: 'be careful, here we cannot intervene to stop the landslide, we can only save what can be saved'? Why was there still a real estate market on those houses in Niscemi? Why were renovations authorized; what happened? Why do people say: they should have planted 1000 trees and they did not, and intervene immediately and they did not do it either before or after?"

Questions to which, according to Musumeci, "the answer is not given by politics but by the judiciary. We need to understand why in thirty years those who were supposed to do their duty did not do it, why so much silence.