Rubbish piles mount, civil defence takes over task

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi made good on a campaign pledge to take his cabinet meeting to the trashstrewn city of Naples, and promptly announced he was appointing the head of the country’s civil defence department to deal with it.
Guido Bertolaso was given the immense task of cleaning up the city and making sure it stays that way, as problems over where to put the rubbish continued. Berlusconi likened the problem to a volcanic eruption and said new landfills will be opened and the army will be called in to guard them, and pledged stiff punishment for anyone caught blocking garbage collection.
He said a new incinerator, whose construction has been delayed, will be built as soon as possible. The garbage has been piling in the streets of Naples since last December when all the available dumps were filled up. Despite emergency measures to resolve the rubbish crisis in the southern Italian city, the situation worsened, with more than 100 fires set to the mountains of garbage and fire crews attacked as they tried to put them out.
Angry city residents set the fires, which the overburdened fire service struggled to extinguish. A television team recorded stones being thrown at one fire crew as it attempted to put out a fire in the suburb of Barra.
“They are also attacking us because of the mountains of rubbish in the streets,” one fireman said. “It’s not the first time they have tried to attack us, and I fear that it will also not be the last.” Rising temperatures worsened the problem of the stinking mounds of trash, which contain up to 5,000 tonnes of material. At the height of the crisis in January, there were 7,000 tonnes of rubbish on the streets of the city of one million people and the surrounding Campania region. Neapolitans reported that the rubbish mountains were hundreds of metres wide in some streets but some launched protests against the city council’s plan to set up a new dump on the outskirts of the city. The European Commission has threatened to fine Italy millions of Euro if it does not sort out the “dramatic refuse crisis.”
The EU’s executive arm said that although Italy had set up a commission to deal with the rubbish problem and that this had improved the situation somewhat, the government’s measures were insufficient to completely resolve the crisis.
Berlusconi has made it his newly-elected government’s priority to clear the streets of Naples and neighbouring areas, where rubbish has gone largely uncollected since December 2007 when local dump sites became full.
Before Berlusconi arrived, a speedily-arranged removal operation ensured that the streets around the meeting’s venue, the central Piazza del Plebiscito square, showed no trace of the piles of trash.