The seismic swarm in Campi Flegrei is causing concern among residents, and the Campania Region has decided to conduct an exercise to test the effectiveness of its evacuation plans.
The announcement was made by the governor, Vincenzo De Luca: “obviously – he explains – we will not be able to evacuate all the inhabitants of the affected areas, but we will be able to carry out an evacuation limited to a few hundred people to verify” whether the emergency plan is working.
The Minister of Civil Protection, Nello Musumeci – who hopes that his ad hoc law (“for which tens and tens of millions are needed”) can be passed “in a couple of weeks” – returns to talk about the need to have an evacuation plan that takes into account “the road network of an area of half a million inhabitants, heavily anthropized”.
“These interventions should have been done 30, 40 years ago but there is no point in crying over spilt milk, we must get to work immediately”, he added. Legambiente also observes that we are still at the stage of “I hope I run away”, when instead “we need detailed evacuation plans, proceeding first of all to make the escape routes, road, rail and sea, easily passable”.
In the meantime, many have gone back to watch two videos posted on Youtube by the INGV in 2011. The first video showed in just 10 minutes the devastation that would occur in the event of an eruption at Campi Flegrei.
This catastrophic scenario, although frightening, is not entirely impossible, as underlined by the INGV (National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology), the Italian body responsible for seismic and volcanic monitoring.
The INGV has hypothesized a critical development similar to the eruption of Monte Nuovo in 1538, which was the most recent and least violent of the over 70 explosive eruptions that occurred in Campi Flegrei. The simulation was carried out in 2011 and uploaded to YouTube. In this simulation, the reference scenario was the eruption of Agnano Monte Spina, which occurred about 4100 years ago, which differs from the previous hypotheses of volcanologists.
The first video shows the evolution of the gas temperature (represented in red) and the areas affected during an eruption. The second video provides a perspective from the ocean.
It is not possible to say with certainty which areas of Campi Flegrei could be affected in the event of an eruption, since there is currently no magma emerging to the surface, and therefore there is no cause for alarm. However, the video shows the areas that could be affected, including Bagnoli and Fuorigrotta. Naples appears to be protected from the threat thanks to the Parco Virgiliano.
“We are working – observes Musumeci – to understand the vulnerability rate of the built environment and also on a serious communication and information campaign, because the population must be aware of living in a territory at risk and be ready, if necessary, to adopt the necessary initiatives”.
On the issue of the progress of the bradyseismic phenomenon, De Luca is reassuring: "we are not facing situations of particular alarm because the control takes place practically 24 hours a day", he says.
A monitoring, observes Francesca Bianco, director of the Department of Volcanoes of the INGV, which “has not highlighted important variations in volcanic dynamics”. As for bradyseism, then, “we are observing an increase, but not at the levels of that of the 80s. We do not know the evolution: these are mostly phenomena linked to earthquakes and, as is well known, earthquakes cannot be predicted” “.
