Nine bridges in Italy have collapsed in five years. How can any of us feel safe driving there?
J UST a few months ago, I was hurrying to a meeting in Genoa. As I came out of Brin metro station and skirted along the footpath overlooking the Polcevera valley, I was suddenly confronted by the Morandi Bridge.
It wasn’t just the scale of the concrete monstrosity – almost a mile long – that shocked me, but the setting.
Chaotic urban development covered every inch of the valley – dozens of railway lines, blocks of flats, an endless tangle of warehouses and roads. It was far removed from what the Italians call ‘a misura d’uomo’ – shaped for mankind. Instead, it screamed hubris.
Today, millions of people around the world are familiar with that setting, from news footage and newspaper photographs, now made apocalyptic following the collapse of the bridge on Tuesday, The death toll so far stands at 39.
Unlike other recent Italian disasters – earthquakes and floods - this wasn’t an ‘act of God’ despite initial claims that the bridge had been hit by lightning during a violent storm, It was recognised almost immediately as a manmade disaster.
With public anger high, Genovese magistrates have already opened a manslaughter investigation.
Many Italians blame organised crime. Planning for the Morandi Bridge, along the route connecting Italy with France, began in the early 1960s, and it opened in 1967.
Although there’s no evidence of any criminal involvement in its construction, Italy’s First Republic, from 1948-1992, was infamous for the collusion between Christian Democrats and organised crime.
The former were guaranteed votes and lucrative backhanders, in return for awarding public contracts to the latter.
Sometimes the cost of that collusion only became apparent decades later. In the past five years, nine other bridges have collapsed throughout Italy. It’s well- established that appalti (public contracts) are one of the biggest earners for the country’s various mafias. Appalti can involve all sectors of public work, from contracts for cleaning and rubbish collection to medical and construction deals.
During the ‘Sack of Palermo’ in the late 1950s and early 60s, the name given to the construction boom that resulted in thousands of shoddy apartment buildings, more than a third of all the 4,000 building permits issued in the Sicilian capital were granted to just three bosses of Cosa Nostra, the island’s mafia. Indeed, nationwide, the mafia generally is so intertwined with big construction projects that in 2001 the then Minister for Infrastructure, Pietro Lunardi, shocked law-abiding Italians by declaring ‘the problems of the mafia have always been present and always will be … we need to learn to live with this reality’.
The reality is that appalti are often the motive for murder as people who interfere or ask too many questions in rigged tender processes are gunned down.
Construction budgets are so large that they provide the perfect opportunity for organised crime to launder money. Sub- contracts then enable crime bosses to determine, in a country with over 30 per cent youth unemployment, who works and who doesn’t.
Anti- mafia organisations frequently allege that inspectors of works are often, themselves, subject to intimidation or sweeteners, meaning there’s little objectivity in safety assessments.
This is particularly dangerous because of another notorious scam favoured by criminal gangs, the use of ‘ impoverished cement’, deploying a weaker mixture which saves money but can cost lives.
Cement, an ingredient of concrete, is laborious to produce (it requires sourcing of high- quality lime or calcium silicate) and expensive to buy, Much better to ‘cut it’ with something far less costly, such as sand, to make it go further. Back in 2009, police were investigating as many as 20 cases of ‘impoverfrom
Hospitals, schools and airports all at risk from mafia’s ‘false’ cement
ished cement’, and according to Legambiente, an environmental pressure group, mafia organisations had even printed lists of ingredients for the most convincing mixes.
The list of buildings nationally at risk of collapse because of the false cement runs into the hundreds, and includes hospitals, schools and airports.
Earthquake reconstruction offers some of the most lucrative public contracts with whole suburbs often needing to be reconstructed. After both the Aquila and Amatrice earthquakes in 2009 and 2016 respectively, construction bosses were wiretapped chuckling about the amount of money to be made.
That, coincidentally, is how the late Riccardo Morandi, the architect of the Genoa bridge, began his sorry career.
He moved to the region of Calabria in south-west Italy in the aftermath of the devastating 1908 earthquake which killed more than 100,000 people. Back then, and for much of the 20th century, there wasn’t much meritocracy in Italy, meaning that the most competent were often elbowed out by the best- connected. And Riccardo Morandi, it’s clear, was far from competent.
He was also a ‘concrete innovator’, favouring pre- stressed reinforced concrete that was later shown to be subject to serious corrosion problems, according to professor of construction, Antonio Brencich, from Genoa University.
Until this week, Morandi’s bridge seemed to be an example not of style over substance – one of the stereotypes of Italian design – but of its exact opposite: it was pigugly, but it seemed to do the job.
There had been alarm bells if only they’d been noted. Morandi had built similar bridges in Venezuela and Libya.
A large section of the first collapsed in 1964 when it was hit by an oil-tanker, and his Wadi el Kuf bridge in Libya was closed last year because of potential fractures. Another of his bridges, over the River Arno in central Italy, was demolished in 2011, and his fourkilometre Akragas viaduct in Sicily was closed in 2015.
Such was the pessimism regarding his bridge in Genoa that its collapse was, in many ways, a disaster foretold. In recent years many voices, from the country’s motorway authority in 2011 to Professor Brencich in 2016, have warned that it wasn’t fit for purpose.
The construction of a parallel bridge, called La Gronda, to relieve the load on the Morandi Bridge, was discussed and shelved.
In April, repair work to retro-fit steel for structural support was commissioned but had yet to start. In the treacle of Italian politics, there was a lot of talk, but not much action. Part of the problem is the topography of Genoa. An important petrol port, it’s the source of much of Italy’s forecourt fuel. But within metres of the sea are steep valleys, densely populated but prone to flash flooding.
There’s no exit from Genoa other than via vertiginous bridges, all of which are ageing and subject to loads which increase year on year.
To replace them, or even repair them, entails the evacuation and rehousing of thousands of citizens.
Since Tuesday, recriminations have been incessant, One of Italy’s ruling parties, the 5 Star Movement, had opposed the new relief bridge as an unnecessary expense because it was a ‘fairy tale’ to suggest that the Morandi Bridge would collapse.
Ridiculed by Italians for this claim, the party has turned its ire on Autostrade per l’Italia, the motorway authority controlled by the Benetton clothing empire through its holding company Atlantia. Luigi Di Maio, the deputy prime minister and leader of the 5 Star Movement, has threatened to fine and re-nationalise the company.
Meanwhile, the interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has blamed the European Union’s budgetary controls for impeding Italian investment in infrastructure.
It has fallen from a total of 14billion euros per annum in 2007 to just five billion in 2015.
The notion that infrastructure spending might now increase exponentially in the aftermath of the Morandi Bridge disaster may hearten some Italians – but others will despair.
Threatened re-nationalisations will once again make contracts the gift of politicians – just as they were in the post-war building boom.
That must be music to the ears of the country’s mafiosi.