Sicily's Waterspouts and the Politics of Prevention

The photographs that travelled furthest this week were of overturned cars and a ruined school in Marsala, on Sicily's western coast. The Guardian reported that two tornadoes, or waterspouts, came ashore near the town on Friday, injuring dozens and damaging buildings as far as Petrosino, south of Trapani. Euronews called the pair 'rare', and the Guardian's video desk noted that experts described the event as almost unprecedented for the island. We record it plainly, because the international press did: a Mediterranean island, in October, struck from the sea by a phenomenon its infrastructure was not built to expect.

What the foreign coverage does not say — because it rarely does — is what such an event means for a country whose coasts, ports and hill towns were designed around a different climate. The wire reports the damage and moves on. But the reader abroad is left with a question the Italian reader is not always invited to ask: whether the seawalls, the drainage, the school roofs of the Mezzogiorno are being rebuilt to a standard the next decade will demand. That is not a partisan question. It is an engineering one, and it is now a recurring one.

We note the asymmetry of attention. A tornado in Sicily is news in London and Doha for a day; the slow work of adaptation is news nowhere. The same wires that carried Marsala this week carried, in the same season, Sicily's drought and the fires of previous summers. The pattern is visible from outside even when it is not named from within: the south of Italy is absorbing the first costs of a changing Mediterranean, and the world is watching in fragments.

Our pages take no pleasure in the fragment. But we take the point the foreign press is making, however incidentally. A country that is reported at one remove is often reported only when it is damaged. The task of a newspaper such as this one is to hold the fragments together long enough to see the shape they make — and this week the shape was a funnel of wind over a Sicilian town, and a school without a roof.