Over the last month, the Carabinieri of the Provincial Command and the Catanzaro Forestry Group have implemented a monitoring and control plan on the entire provincial territory regarding environmental matters. Illicit management and abandonment of waste, unauthorized discharge of waste water. Offenses relating to forestry and protection of environmental heritage. These are the crimes targeted by the numerous services carried out in the last thirty days by the Carabinieri.
The results were not long in coming. In fact, numerous waste management companies and commercial activities were checked. The toll is 18 people reported to the Judicial Authority, the seizure of a property, an industrial warehouse, a construction company, three trucks, two excavators, eleven abandoned vehicles and a total area of 2,000 m2.
During the service operations, technical aids such as drones, photo traps and cameras were also deployed which made it possible to document five episodes of illicit waste management, two cases of abandonment of non-hazardous waste, to ascertain three discharges of waste water without authorization and to ascertain that a company in the sector failed to keep the waste loading and unloading register. The high administrative fines amount to a total of over €57,000.
In particular, in San Vito sull’Ionio, the police caught two workers from a construction company uprooting five olive trees without the required authorization from the relevant Regional Body. In Carlopoli, three were reported for illegally taking earthy material and rocks in a state-owned area along the Corace river. In Amato, in a wooded area, five people were carrying out unauthorized work on landscape assets subject to restrictions. A complaint was also made against them. And again, the stringent activity with the help of drones, photo traps and cameras focused on the Lamezia area, managing to identify four people who abandoned waste along a peripheral road artery and also documenting two illegal discharges of industrial waste water from an oil mill, with the seizure of the building and equipment.
The Carabinieri’s frontal activity to combat environmental damage will continue unabated in parallel with numerous environmental education initiatives in schools in the province.