Italy's government on Friday authorised the army to intervene in the Sicilian port city of Messina, which has been without water for most of the past two weeks after a landslides broke an aqueduct.
"We accompany the state of emergency with an initial funding allocation for the necessary work and we are also putting the army at the city's disposition," Cabinet secretary Claudio De Vincenti said after a cabinet meeting.
The situation in Messina was "intolerable" and the government has given Italy's civil protection department "extraordinary powers" to handle the crisis, he said.
The crisis deepened in Messina on Friday when a bypass pipe that had restored some water supplies to the city by connecting two aqueducts broke.
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