The heatwave has deprived hundreds of thousands of Sicilians of electricity and water in the Catania region, a city “on its knees” according to its mayor, where a crisis meeting was organized on Monday.
Extreme heat in Italy: heatwave leads to power and water cuts.
The mercury rose to 47.6°C on Monday, according to the civil protection authorities in Catania, in the east of the island. Since Thursday, around 500,000 people have been without power in turn, a municipal spokesman told AFP.
“On the one hand, we are paying the price of climate change, to which we should have paid more attention several years ago, and on the other, we are paying the price of an infrastructure that seems totally unsuited to the new context”, said the Minister of Civil Protection, Nello Musumeci, quoted by the press agencies.
E-distribuzione, the subsidiary of Italian energy giant Enel that manages electricity distribution in Catania, explained that “the temperature of the asphalt is scorching and has been approaching 50°C for weeks. This, combined with high humidity, means that the heat cannot be dissipated properly, causing damage to the buried cables”.
The mayor of Catania, Enrico Trantino, said he had “asked E-distribuzione to speed up as much as possible the interventions for the return of electricity (…) to put back on its feet a city on its knees (…)”.
E-distribuzione claims to have deployed hundreds of technicians and dozens of generators. These power cuts led to water shortages for between 200,000 and 300,000 people, said the manager of the Sidra water network, adding that the problems had been resolved by Monday morning. The local authorities have made air-conditioned spaces available to the elderly and other vulnerable people, as well as the homeless, asking the population to moderate the use of air conditioners so as not to exacerbate the problems.
