Aug. 30 – From the Dolomites to the Hindukush Mountains, Italians and Afghans work together to prevent avalanches. The Forecasts and Planning Office (Meteotrentino ) of the Autonomous Province of Trento recently welcomed two technicians (one Afghan and one Italian) who will operate in Afghanistan after following a course in Trentino on snow and avalanches. The training is part of a collaboration between the Civil Protection and Alpistan, an NGO that is developing a project aimed at the prevention of avalanche danger in favor of the Afghan population. The course involved managers and technicians of the Civil Protection. The course covered the birth and evolution of the snowpack to the evaluation of its stability, studying maps and detecting avalanches, creating and managing archives, developing observation techniques… As early as next winter the two engineers will be able to put in place the technical knowledge received in the classroom on the field. Alpistan is an NGO operating in Afghanistan alongside the local government, the Italian one, and with the UN agency for natural disasters (United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs – UNOCHA). Its avalanche mission pilot project has been developed on behalf of the nascent Afghan civil protection (Afghanistan natural disaster management agency – Andma). The goal is to identify, study and monitor the most common catastrophic situations and create a service similar to the Trentino agency. The project was approved and funded by UNOCHA. The Trentino Provincial Government accepted in early July Alpistan’s request to become its first partner and provide technical support. The Afghan territory is 70 % mountainous and densely inhabited even at high altitudes; these areas are often subject to avalanches and there are many victims (according to data collected by the Trentino Civil Defence in 2011, casualities amounted to 350, but this is probably an underestimation). In Europe and America, each year there are on average 150 avalanche victims, the vast majority involved with sports activities.
