The Trinita dam, built in 1959 in the town of Castelvetrano in the west of the Mediterranean island, has not been tested and therefore has never been officially approved for use.
So as soon as the reservoir fills up with winter rains, the authorities open the floodgates and the blue gold pours into a canal ending in the sea.
“Okay, the drought is due to lack of rain. But we don’t know how to manage the water we have — and it’s not the farmers’ responsibility,” said Cognata, as he looked into the dam, the low water level revealing rusting steel tubes.
The dam was intended to supply local irrigation networks, so farmers’ wells were closed by authorities.
But the infrastructure not only never got the green light, it was also subsequently neglected.
The pipes are now dilapidated, leaving some desperate farmers to dig illegal wells to compensate.
Cognata blames decades of incompetent local and government water management.
“They were never interested,” he said.
It is an accusation repeated often by Italy’s main agricultural organisation Coldiretti, to which Cognata belongs.
Sicilians have always known drought, but global warming is accentuating its frequency and intensity.
This year “rainfall is down by about 350 mm compared to an average annual rainfall of 750 mm”, said hydrology professor Leonardo Valerio Noto.
In his office at the University of Palermo, he analyses satellite images of the island’s 46 artificial reservoirs.
“Many of these reservoirs are already in a near-critical situation. Some are practically empty while others, particularly those serving large cities, are experiencing a significant decrease in resources,” he told AFP.
The summer of 2025 could be even worse, with withdrawals expected to be greater than rainfall.
Some provinces, especially in the south, are seriously lacking in drinking water and cuts are recurrent.
Like Cognata, Noto deplores the lack of public investment in maintaining the distribution network.
Italy is the leading EU country in terms of absolute volumes of fresh water drawn from the surface or underground.
But “out of 100 litres injected into the distribution network, 42 are lost along the way” due to the poor condition of the pipes, Noto said.
According to the National Institute of Statistics (Istat), the wasted water would meet the annual needs of 43 million people — or three out of four Italians.
