Nine who died in Sicily may be latest of thousands of victims of unauthorised construction

The villa in the Sicilian town of Casteldaccia where a family of nine died during floods last Saturday could have been demolished two years ago.

The property was built too close to the Milicia River, in an area of high hydrological risk, but the owners appealed against a demolition order and it was never carried out.

The nine members of the Giordano family who died, including three children aged one, three and 15, appear to be the latest victims of illegal Italian construction that has led to thousands of deaths.

Men, women and children have lost their lives trapped in houses built without proper authorisation, thrown together in areas of high seismic risk, a few steps from rivers or at the foot of hills at hydrogeological risk. According to data from the Italian Territorial Agency, 1.2m homes in Italy are illegal. The Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) said that in 2015 alone nearly 20 illegal buildings were put up for every 100 authorised ones.

“We have built and continue to build in areas where we shouldn’t ever have,” Maurizio Carta, a professor of city planning at the University of Palermo, told the Guardian. “We have erected villas and buildings in fragile areas, along riverbeds, in areas prone to landslides, along cliffs, and in high-risk hydrogeological and seismic areas, which increases the risk for people living there – in essence, where they should not be living in the first place.”

According to magistrates, a building in Torre Annunziata, in the province of Naples, that collapsed on the night of 7 July 2017, killing eight people, was illegal. Many houses that collapsed in Ischia during an earthquake in August 2017 had been built without proper authorisation.

Prosecutors have launched an investigation into the deaths in Casteldaccia. Magistrates who visited the villa on Sunday morning said they suspected the property was built illegally.

According to the newspaper La Stampa, in 2012 Italian prosecutors ordered the demolition of 46,700 buildings but only 10% of that plan was executed. Corriere della Sera,citing official data from Istat, the non-profit environmental association Lagambiente and Cresme, the Italian Institute for Economic Research, said 80% of the demolition orders issued from 2004 to 2018 had not yet been executed.

In 2016 Angelo Cambiano, the then mayor of Licata, in the province of Agrigento, tried to enforce the law and presented a demolition plan for dozens of houses in the city that had been built without regular authorisation. As a result, he said, “they burnt down two of my houses, I received three letters containing death threats and an envelope with bullets.” Cambiano said he had to have a police escort for more than a year.

Cambiano was not intimidated and carried out his demolition plan. Then his own city council decided to get rid of him. Seven of the councillors who demanded and supported a vote of no confidence against the mayor were owners of houses that had to be demolished.

“I was kicked out for trying to enforce the law,” said Cambiano, who returned to teaching mathematics. “But unfortunately today the policy is of consensus and people obviously do not like demolitions. There are regional deputies in Sicily who have been elected because in the election campaign they promised to put a stop to my demolition orders.”

Instead of ordering the demolition of houses, Italian politicians have often adopted regulations that save engineers and owners from convictions, enriching the state at the same time – a process called condono edilizio, which translates as “amnesty building”.

The process is that the owners of an illegal building have the opportunity to save their home from demolition by paying a sum of €60-€150 (£53-£131) per square metre of their house. In return, the state abandons criminal prosecution.

From 1985 to 2004, Italian governments decreed three nationwide building amnesties (the last one during the government of Silvio Berlusconi), collecting a total of about €16bn.

“We should have thought about building in safe areas; we should have carried out demolitions to guarantee first of all the safety of the inhabitants,” said Piero Pelizzaro, the chief resilience officer for the city of Milan. “Instead, for many years the state has traded our own safety for money. We saved our homes from demolitions but we could not save our children’s lives.”