BRIDGE COLLAPSE SHOWS BIG PROBLEM
ROME• It has been the stuff of macabre legend for years — that those who cross the Sicilian mafia end up encased in the concrete pylons of viaducts and bridges.
The truth about the mafia and construction, however, is more prosaic — and far more lethal.
Rather than dumping rival gangsters into wet cement, organized crime groups imperil people’s lives by building bridges, tunnels, roads and apartment blocks with low quality materials and slapdash techniques.
Using cement containing too much sand, for instance, produces bridges and viaducts liable to crumble.
Italian prosecutors have launched an investigation into Tuesday’s collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa, a disaster which has so far claimed the lives of 38 people, with another 10 to 20 still missing.
There is no suggestion, at this point, that organized crime had any role in the construction of the bridge. It was completed in 1967, before the mafia organizations of the south had started their infiltration of northern Italy.
But the bridge collapse is the latest symptom of Italy’s woeful infrastructure, a sector where big projects have provided rich pickings for the Camorra of Naples, the ‘Ndrangheta of Calabria and Cosa Nostra in Sicily.
“There are severe problems with sub-contracting. They are fly-by-night operations and they cut corners,” said John Dickie, an expert on organized crime and professor of Italian studies at University College London.
Natural disasters have also provided rich pickings for the corrupt in Italy.
Organized crime syndicates moved into central Italy after an earthquake hit the mountain city of L’Aquila in 2009, according to thethen head of the parliamentary anti-mafia commission.
The same thing happened in the aftermath of the country’s next big earthquake, which hit the town of Amatrice in 2016.
“They disgust me,” Nicola Zingaretti, the governor of the Lazio region, said at the time.
Decades of under-investment, political paralysis and dysfunction have taken as heavy a toll on Italy’s infrastructure as the depredations of the mafia and corrupt businessmen.
Work has only just finished on a major highway linking Salerno, south of Naples, with Reggio Calabria in the toe of the Italian boot — despite it being started in 1966.
Italy’s populist government has accused Autostrade per l’Italia, the firm that managed the Genoa motorway bridge, of putting profits before safety and failing to spend enough on maintenance — a charge the company vociferously denies.
But a report emerged yesterday, commissioned by the company itself, which warned about the condition of the concrete-encased cable stays that held the bridge up.