This official Navy Web site has been designed to keep Naples-based residents informed of environmental studies and timelines, and to answer questions regarding environmental and health impacts of living in the Naples and Campania area. ()
NAPLES, Italy — Air monitoring sensors should be up and running by Thursday at the Navy base in Gricignano, according to U.S. and Italian officials.
The Agenzia Regionale Protezione Ambientale Campania, the Italian equivalent to the Environmental Protection Agency, will set up a monitoring station on the base for roughly two weeks to test for potentially harmful elements residents might be breathing, said Guiseppe D’Antonio, the agency’s air quality director.
“It will be there a minimum of two weeks, and more if it is necessary,” he said.
Experts will have results within days of collection to determine if the air is “polluted” under safe air-quality standards set by the Italian government in 2002, he said.
The station will be set up in a small field on the southwest corner of the base, near the SS7 highway and a few blocks from some apartment buildings.
ARPAC’s testing will be done in conjunction with, but independent of, analysis by a U.S.-based company contracted by the Navy to conduct a wider environmental screening of the Naples area, said Lt. Cmdr. Wendy Snyder, a Navy Region Europe spokeswoman.
Tetra Tech, an environmental consulting and engineering firm, sent nine representatives to Naples last week to “meet with counterparts and finalize a plan” for testing, she said.
Navy officials intend to post results of tests, as they get them, on a Naval Support Avctivity Web page designed specifically to keep Naples-based residents informed, she said.
The Web site was created shortly after a trash crisis battered the Naples area in mid-December. With dumpsites at capacity, trash haulers ceased collecting garbage. Thousands of tons of refuse littered the roadways or were accumulated into mounds several feet high and several feet deep.
The crisis has drawn negative attention internationally, causing tourism to plummet and some U.S. officials and servicemembers to question how healthy a tour to Naples might be.
Tetra Tech will send collected data to a team of U.S. environmental and health experts from the Navy and Marine Corps Public Health Center in Virginia. They will scrutinize findings on air, water, soil and food and conduct short-term and long-term analyses to determine if assignments to Naples jeopardize servicemembers’ health.
The Web site includes a section on community health awareness that answers questions in six categories: air; food; garbage collection, recycling; health; health assessment; and water. Its address is: http://www.nsa.naples.navy.mil/risk/index.cfm.
