Below forty metres you give notice: fifteen days, to the Agency

Since 8 August a decree has let the Agency for the security of underwater activities spend and recruit before its own organisational regulation is even written: Decree-Law No. 144 of 7 August 2026, Article 24, lets the Director-General use resources already available under existing legislation ‘pending the entry into force of the regulation’ (our translation from the Italian original), and raises from 30 to 40 per cent the workforce share the Agency may recruit, with at least six in management roles. For anyone laying, inspecting or repairing submarine cables, the news is not the org chart: the founding law, 9/2026, gives Article 10 a fifteen-day notice for work below forty metres, and lets the Agency move it in space or time.

The threshold, and what falls under it

Article 2, paragraph 1, letter a) of Law 9/2026 defines an ‘underwater dimension activity’ as any activity that, on the seabed, in the subsoil beneath it or in the waters above it, ‘takes place, at least in part, at a depth equal to or greater than 40 metres below mean sea level’. Two details matter more than the figure: the ‘at least in part’ is enough — no need to stay at that depth for the whole job; and the same provision brings in, on equal terms, ‘the deployment and launching into the water of underwater operators or vehicles, whether crewed, uncrewed or remotely operated’.

For cable work, this closes off any room for interpretation. An ROV inspection to identify a cable from its vibration at forty metres or deeper falls under the definition just as a diver’s descent would; so does an AUV surveying the seabed ahead of a repair. The threshold does not distinguish crewed from remote presence: only depth.

Fifteen days ahead

Article 10, ‘Managing interference in the underwater dimension’, requires anyone intending to carry out these activities in internal marine waters, in the territorial sea or, for the continental shelf and exclusive economic zone, exercising jurisdictional powers granted to the coastal State, to notify the Agency ‘with a minimum of fifteen days’ notice’ — save for urgency, rescue and civil-protection operations. The notification states the activities, the day or days, the planned time, and any authorisations already granted.

The Agency forwards the notification without delay to the military, maritime, public-security and judicial-police authorities, and has ten days from the notification to adopt the measures — not merely to look into the file. The competent authority has five days from receipt to flag its own activities, military or civil, that might interfere. One of the four cases in paragraph 2 speaks directly to readers of this piece: letter d) covers activities ‘liable to cause the tampering, damage or destruction of cables, submarine pipelines, artificial islands, installations or other structures’. Work on a cable is, by definition, a candidate for review.

The power that reshapes a job site

If one of the conditions in paragraph 2 is met, paragraph 3 lets the Agency adopt risk-mitigation measures, safety zones to observe, or ‘identify a different spatial or temporal setting in which the notified activity may be carried out’: it can move the job site, not just fence it off.

No need to dramatise this: it is the same power maritime authorities already exercise over other sea activities. For anyone planning a laying or repair campaign, though, the fifteen-day notice is a schedule line that, within a ten-day window, can return a constraint of space, of time, or both. Anyone already writing the coordination of civil works a month ahead of the design into a specification knows the logic: an upstream time constraint is a design input, not a discovery made once the ship is already at sea.

What the Agency does about cables

Article 13, ‘Security of underwater infrastructure’, lists Agency duties bearing directly on submarine cables: monitoring, with the Operations Centre and Navy assets, activities that risk interfering with cables and pipelines by type, proximity or depth; helping define checking, surveying and monitoring measures for the entire network of underwater infrastructure of national interest; and helping define emergency plans for restoring broken cables and pipelines, including urgent-repair procedures on the continental shelf.

The last two items matter most here. The Agency promotes coordination among administrations for ‘recovering surplus bandwidth or traffic between different users’ when a cable breaks: the response is also a shared routing decision, not just an isolated technical fix. And it helps define, for security purposes, the route of new cables on the shelf — ‘having consulted the operators concerned’. The route of a cable is no longer just a technical or commercial choice.

How we check it

In specifications for routes that touch the sea, we check that the fifteen-day notice to the Agency is a line item in the schedule, not a last-minute formality. We check that it is written down who sends the notification — the client or the contractor — and with what data. We check that any measure the Agency imposes is written in as grounds for suspension, with contractual effects defined in advance, not negotiated on the day. And we check that the dates notified, the responses received and the measures imposed end up in the as-built record, together with the route and depths of the line.

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What falls outside the scope

Law 9/2026 has a defined scope: it applies to underwater dimension activities in areas under national sovereignty or jurisdiction and, for infrastructure of national interest only, on the high seas too, without prejudice to international obligations and EU constraints. Excluded under Article 1: military, judicial-police and public-security activities, the fire brigade, fishing, national security including cyber security, and tourist, recreational or sporting activities. The law does not affect powers already assigned elsewhere.

A note on method, because it concerns the very source this article draws on: a decree-law takes effect immediately, but must be converted into law within sixty days, and can be amended during conversion. What is written above about Decree-Law 144/2026 holds for the text published in the Official Gazette on 7 August; the converted text will need to be read again, and we will do so.

What to write into the specification

The fifteen-day notice to the Agency as an explicit schedule milestone, not a footnote.
Who notifies: client or contractor, and with what internal lead time ahead of the statutory fifteen days.
The full list of data to transmit: activities, day or days, planned time, authorisations already granted.
The Agency’s ten-day response window, treated as a planning risk, not dead time.
Contractual handling of safety zones or rescheduling the Agency imposes: who bears delays and costs, on what extensions.
Recording notifications, responses and measures in the completion documentation, with the as-built route and depths.

Two threads, applied

First thread: the notice, its content, the ten-day window and any measures received do not stay an administrative task in a drawer. They become verifiable lines in the specification and acceptance checkpoints, with a record the client can produce at any time.

Second thread: the traces, measurements and as-built record of a route touching the sea — path, depths, landing points, measures received, authorised windows — do not stay loose sheets between site and archive. With CSIDIA, the group’s other company, they become a single map of the network on which an AI runs the diagnosis and the crew closes the fault: knowing where a cable runs, at what depth and under what constraints separates a search campaign from a targeted intervention — the same logic behind that ‘recovery of surplus bandwidth or traffic’ in Article 13.

Within the client’s perimeter: on-premise, on self-contained machines that need no deep integration into the existing network, or a dedicated cloud with a data centre in Italy, always with shared management.

Do you have routes that touch the sea, and a specification that does not yet name the Agency for the security of underwater activities? Talk to an engineer: the site visit is at no cost, and the notice gets written in before the cable is laid, not on the day an unexpected measure arrives.