Politicans face jeers as Genoa bridge victims are laid to rest
With divided city at a standstill, Italians vent anger at authorities after collapse that killed 41
GENOA’S love-hate relationship with Morandi Bridge is well known in Italy. Everyone used it. Everyone needed it. Everyone knew it needed repair.
It was both monument and monster, revered as a point of pride in the collective memory of the city, yet feared as it corroded and crumbled, growing more decrepit each year. Inaugurated with great fanfare in 1967, the Morandi viaduct served as the main east-west artery linking Genoa and the entire southern Mediterranean.
It was a key logistics point for trucks loading and unloading containers in Italy’s biggest gateway port and an interchange point for three motorways. All traffic from Portugal, France and Spain that was headed anywhere in Italy south of Milan passed over the bridge.
But on 11.36am on Tuesday, August 14, the towering concrete icon of national pride collapsed into a jagged heap, swallowing carloads of innocent passers-by, crushing the dreams of dozens of families and taking down Italy’s collective confidence with it.
A state funeral of 18 of the victims was held yesterday just hours after the bodies of yet another family – mother, father and nine-year-old daughter – were extracted from their car under the rubble, bringing the death toll to 41.
Politicians at the funeral were booed as public anger rises over the tragedy.
Genoa’s very own “Brooklyn Bridge,” is testament to both human feat and failure, symbolising the downhill slide from Italy’s post-war miracle years toward its modern era of chronic neglect.
“There was a lack of maintenance by a private company, but also a lack of any alternative from the government,” says Enrico Musso, a University of Genoa professor of transport economics. “It’s like if you have just one pair of favourite shoes and you wear them and wear them.”
Now Italy is barefoot. Rough estimates of damage to the country’s image, infrastructure and supply chain are in the hundreds of millions of euros, up to half a billion, Edoardo Rixi, undersecretary of transport and infrastructure, told The Sunday Telegraph.
“This collapse is a stab in the back of the economy of our country, especially for northern Italy, which was seeing signs of a comeback,” said Mr Rixi, of the far-Right League party who had himself passed over the bridge shortly before the collapse.
An estimated 3,000 lorries crossed Morandi bridge each day, some bringing perishable goods to and from Italy to France and Spain, and others to load and unload the 2.6million containers coming in yearly to the two main port terminals, now awkwardly located on either side of the collapsed bridge.
Produce prices will go up in southern France. Lorries carrying refrigerated goods for French supermarket Carrefour will have higher toll and petrol costs in order to stock its stores throughout central and southern Italy.
Tourists will also face inconveniences. Steve Best, a 38-year-old father of three from Norwich, arrived in Genoa just two hours after the collapse, en route to Portofino for their first family trip to Italy. “We saw the bridge as we went by. It’s scary,” he said. British citizens are Liguria’s fifth most common visitors, with numbers rising by 17 per cent so far this year.
Father and son publicans Stefano Icardi, 74 and Federico Giannoni, 50, depend on an influx of British tourists to their English-style pub, the Britannia, in Genoa city. “People who are supposed to come might think twice due to the chaos and traffic,” said Federico. “We’re worried they might cancel.”
More than 4.2million people board cruises ships or ferries in Genoa each year, but now anyone arriving in the airport and heading to ferries or seaside areas to the south like Cinque Terre will find themselves stuck in Genoa’s urban traffic with thousands of trucks serving the port and local commuters trying to cross the city.
Asked what the lorry drivers are saying, Nicola Russo, 57, a Genoa deliveryman for 30 years, said. “It is going to be extremely stressful.”
A spokesman for Ansaldo Energia, a power generation engineering company based in Genoa, said production was suspended while it assesses damage to one of its warehouses near the bridge and its transport logistics.
Italian press reports say a study last year commissioned by Autostrade per
L’Italia, who operate the motorway, warned that the bridge needed urgent maintenance, though Autostrade insists it has carried out regular quarterly checks on the bridge and fulfilled all legal requirements, even investing €1bn (£896m) annually in the past five years and turning to independent ex-
perts to verify reports. Yesterday the company said it would set up a fund for the victims’ families.
The record shows government officials from the Right and Left also failed to heed warnings. And an alternative bypass in Genoa was among the big infrastructure improvements in Italy that the Five Star Movement opposed.
Mr Rixi, ministry of infrastructure and transport, pledged that the government will act swiftly to rebuild a bridge and possibly revoke the concession to operate the motorway from Autostrade per L’Italia and its parent company, Atlantia, controlled by the Benetton family, for what he called a “lack of social responsibility”.
“Even rescue vehicles and ambulances had to stop to pay tolls at the Genoa motorway exits after the disaster. Have they no shame? For this reason we are taking a hard line,” Mr Rixi said. “Until they show some empathy toward Genoa, the victims and their families and a minimum of responsibility for what has taken place, we are not going to negotiate.”
That tough talk is popular among Italians, who have faced numerous motorway toll increases recent years, despite deteriorating road conditions.
If there is a silver lining, it is that the city whose native son is the world’s most famous navigator – Christopher Columbus – is now forced to modernise as it grows into a strategic Mediterranean port hub.
“I am in contact with Marseille and Barcelona and we are trying to understand how we can adjust some of the logistics, “Paolo Emilio Signorini, president of the port of Genoa authority told The Telegraph. “We are going to have to rethink everything.”