If you don’t live in a mountainous area affected by storm Vaja, this date might not even mean anything to you. In this article I want to tell you what it has meant for me and my family.
Evening was coming and I could hear the wind whistling in my home in LUSIANA CONCO (VI). I simply made sure that all the balconies were closed.
The next day I woke up as if nothing had happened but with a strange feeling. The room light was strangely not working, so I opened the balcony and got the impression that something was wrong. As I looked up at the house in front of me, I realised that something had happened, the photovoltaic system, installed in the roof, had torn off and was in the middle of the road.
Afterwards I moved towards Asiago, passing through the woods I saw, a real disaster.
In this article, I do not want to dwell on what it meant to see hundreds of fir trees swept away by the fury of the wind, but I do want to focus more on the consequences that followed.
Something serious had happened and I immediately tried to connect to my favourite online newspaper, once connected I had confirmation of what had happened. In fact, some people were talking about tornadoes, others about strong winds, and the exact dynamics of the events were not yet known. Videos of the disrupted roads followed one another on social networks.
The most incredible thing was the realisation that we were indeed without electricity. With the environmental disaster that had happened overnight, the power lines had been overrun by trees. Instantly I was concerned about:
- And how do I feed the computer?
- Will we only be able to heat ourselves with the wood-burning stove?
- How do I recharge the phone’s batteries?
Reflecting back, I felt a little uneasy that my thoughts were rather individualistic and were very little compared to what the environmental damage had been.
However, at that moment they were my real thoughts.
That morning, we got organised and took a shower with the remaining hot water.
Come evening, however, something magical happened. October, for us, is chestnut season. We had a nice family dinner with candlelight and a final tasting of chestnuts (with red wine) in front of the fireplace. I still have the memory of that wonderful evening where events took us back at least fifty years, when electricity was only used to light the rooms, while heating the house was done by lighting the fireplace and wood stove.
Today it is about 2 years since that 29 October 2018 and I always ask myself: is it possible that it takes a storm to make us appreciate the comforts we all have inside our homes today?
Are we sure that the comforts we have today will also be there tomorrow?
In reality, the inconveniences were not insurmountable, and electricity returned after a couple of days, in some areas of the Asiago Plateau 7 Municipalities and missed for several weeks. For several days we saw ENEL vehicles running up and down the streets of the plateau.
In the end, everything was resolved but we never returned to our old life. Something we wanted to change.
We decided to change a simple behaviour: we now turn off the television when we have dinner.
It may seem like a small thing, but it took storm Vaja to make us savour the pleasure of a family dinner again. The pleasure of conviviality, listening and dialogue, without disturbances, without distractions.
We kept this memory when we decided to realise our dream in the drawer: to build a Albergo Diffuso in Lusiana Conco. We wanted to recover an old structure so that you could experience the mountains in complete relaxation and far from the ‘noise’ that plagues our age. I am not just referring to the noise in the sense of sound but to the constant bombardment we receive from the media, which ultimately takes away our awareness of living our lives.
It is also thanks to Storm Vaja, that today we have complete awareness of what we have and the life we are living.
Cecilia
