Lake Garda Cleanup: Volunteers Remove Debris from Shoreline and Water

It won’t be exactly a dive into the bluest waters. In fact: the mission that the volunteers of the Castelnuovo protection group will undertake throughout October 14th will consist precisely of extracting from the lakebed everything that shifts the potential blue hue of those waters towards shades of an unlikely brown. “A similar operation,” explains Franco Zendrini, who is the group’s president, “was carried out a few years ago, and we pulled out all kinds of merchandise from the water.” The volunteers’ work — which for the day has also alerted their colleagues from the Ana protection group of Peschiera and the dive team of Villafranca — will take place along just over two hundred meters of Lake Garda shoreline, starting from the Campanello area of Peschiera. It won’t be a working area as vast as one might wish, but it’s still the maximum the Port Authority has granted the group to clean, consequently restricting navigation in that stretch: “After all,” Zendrini explains, “in a single day, we wouldn’t even manage to cover a larger area, because the floors are muddy and shallow.” And in a meter and a half, simply moving an object can stir up the waters for a long time, forcing the “cleaner” to endure a lengthy interruption. To complete the task, designated under the inevitable title of “clean seabed operation,” the volunteers will count — besides the invited external colleagues — on their thirteen certified divers (meaning they are indeed qualified to perform diving activities), who will dive from the five boats that the group managed to retrieve: “Primarily,” says Zendrini, “we have a rubber boat equipped with gear that the Regione Lombardia and the Comune gave us at the end of last year; then, we can rely on our small boat, and also on the boats that our members have decided to make available.” For storing bottles, plastic bags, tires, cans, and all the diverse objects left behind by the summer beachgoers in Lake Garda, the Castelnuovo protection group has equipped itself with about ten jute sacks: “To the Comune,” says the president, “we asked for the possibility of using a container to deposit the waste we collect, and we asked the depuration facility manager to take care of disposing of these ‘special’ waste materials.” Once recovered from their underwater adventure, the forty-odd volunteers from Castelnuovo will resume their usual winter “on-land” activities: “At the end of October,” Zendrini states, “we will start visiting schools again for our first aid courses, in preparation for the drill that, like every year, will involve the town’s students again this winter.” Essentially, this means that students and teachers will have to leave all schools — quickly but in an organized manner — exactly as they should in case of any calamity, from fire to earthquake. As for the summer, most of the members’ activity involves deploying volunteers and a rubber boat — which costs around 25 million lira, “and thankfully,” Zendrini smiles, “the Regione and the Comune helped us!” — to patrol the waters around Lake Garda during weekends, in coordination with police and carabinieri. The alert almost always comes from the Prefecture: “They are the ones,” explains the president, “who invite us to take action as soon as a danger to citizens’ safety is reported.” For such emergencies, therefore, necessary preparations must be made: “And together with colleagues from Malcesine, for example,” Zendrini concludes, “we update ourselves on the intervention protocols to follow in case of forest or civil fires.”