Civic Monitoring of Flood Risks in Palma di Montechiaro

“On an ordinary school day, 16 boys and girls from the Odierna High School in Palma di Montechiaro heard about OpenCoesione for the first time. After various research and discussions, they brought to light 'Watershed”.

This is how the Watershed team of students begins their story about their initial meetings in 2018 in the classroom to choose a project to monitor in their area and start planning a path with clear objectives and, most importantly, results to achieve. From the very beginning, as you can see from the blog posts available on our website, you can sense their great passion and, even more, their urgency to "do" for their own community, to make their voices heard on important issues, such as the frequent flooding of the city due to heavy rainfall, increasingly frequent extreme events due to climate change.

This is a problem that periodically occurs in Sicily, as in several Italian cities, and is often addressed with structural works designed to counteract such phenomena and their maintenance, an essential activity to avoid rendering the economic efforts and planned investments futile.

The monitored project, with a budget of €1,277,065.82, involved the construction of a drainage channel protecting the city of Palma di Montechiaro (AG) from rainwater flowing down from Mount Pizzillo, carrying large quantities of water and debris, causing damage to the population, roads, and buildings.

The students of Odierna High School realized that the project had been successfully completed, but the municipality was not adequately providing care and constant maintenance for the water-cutting infrastructure.

As their civic monitoring report compiled on the Monithon platform indicates, "site inspections revealed that the drains were filled with weeds and debris, preventing water from entering the conduit and flowing to the sea. Additionally, the iron covers of some manholes had been stolen and replaced with stones that do not seal tightly, allowing debris to enter the channel."

The team therefore made it a priority to assess the real effectiveness and impact of the project. The students from Agrigento not only sought the opinion of citizens on the functioning of the drainage channel but also engaged with the relevant technicians and the Mayor of the city, at the time Engineer Stefano Castellino, proposing the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding to ensure continuous maintenance of the channel, which has been functioning effectively ever since.

As Professor Carmelo Ferrara explains, "thanks to our civic monitoring, we often see municipal workers taking care of the water-cutting infrastructure observed by my students. I know this because it's right near our school, so it's easy to keep an eye on."

Years later, the positive effect of the civic monitoring by ASOC students continues to have an impact on Public Administrations that collect their suggestions and put their ideas into practice.

The Watershed team, ranked second in the ASOC TOP TEN 2018-2019 and winner of the prize offered by the Senate of the Republic, developed "WS MONITOR," a prototype smartphone app through which anyone could become a "citizen monitor." With a simple tap, they could send text and photos about the state of the channel's health. In reality, the application could have worked for all projects on the OpenCoesione portal.

"At the end of our civic monitoring journey," Professor Ferrara continues, "a publicly-owned company in the Municipality of Palma di Montechiaro that dealt with waste collection asked us to develop additional features for the same prototype, especially to identify citizens responsible for improper waste disposal. It was a nice challenge, and at first, we tried it, but then it became too costly."

Calogero Monachello, a former member of the Watershed team, recently graduated in computer engineering, a university choice he made thanks to ASOC. He can't list all the memories from that time, but one thing he still carries with him from the civic monitoring experience is that with dedication and persistence, even something seemingly impossible can become a reality. He created the WS Monitor prototype: "To ensure the problem of the drainage channel was resolved, we realized the need to get noticed. So, we participated in various public initiatives throughout the province, appeared on a radio program, and even attended a city council meeting, emphasizing the importance of civic monitoring. At a certain point, it seemed like this wasn't enough; we needed something stronger. So, right in the midst of the digital age, a crazy idea gradually took hold in our minds: to develop an app for civic monitoring."

Like Calogero, Miriam Vitello, thanks to the ASOC project, overcame her shyness and fear of speaking in public, contributing significantly to her personal growth. An exciting journey, capable of influencing not only the professional choices and personal development of students who pursue it with great seriousness and passion but often capable of changing the state of things and realizing both small and big dreams.