Posted on 05/18/2004 11:51:48 AM PDT by presidio9
The strait is the stuff of legend: from the toe of Italy's boot Calabria falls to the shore in steep green folds. Three kilometres away, across sea said to have been ruled by monsters and mobsters, the ancient Sicilian city of Messina cascades down the steep hillside to the port.
Now the Messina Strait is to be conquered - by the mightiest bridge in the world. Silvio Berlusconi - battered by negative opinion polls, tormented in Iraq, and frustrated by an economy that has been flat for two years - hopes the Messina bridge will be the ace up his sleeve.
Politicians and engineers have dreamed of bridging the 3.2km strait between Italy and Sicily for thousands of years but Berlusconi is the first Prime Minister with a big enough majority, a sufficiently stable Government, and the available technology to see it through.
Its span between the main towers will be longer than that of any suspension bridge. Japan's Akashi Kaikyo bridge will still stretch further, but at 1991m its span is shorter than the 3300m one Berlusconi plans to build. At 60.4m, with 12 train and traffic lanes, the Italian behemoth will also be nearly twice as broad. The four anchor posts will be 382.6m, 85m higher than those of the Japanese bridge, higher than the Eiffel Tower, and each will weigh 56,000 tonnes.
Engineers have designed a form based on a trimaran-hulled boat. Giorgio Diana, the director of the wind tunnel at the Milan Polytechnic, where tests were carried out, said: "Our task was to invent a structure capable of taming the wind forces, transforming them into an element of stabilisation. We succeeded in doing this by creating voids between the motor traffic lanes on the outside and the railway tracks which run down the middle."
The structure is designed to absorb winds of up to 90m per second, twice the maximum expected in the channel.
Not everyone is impressed. Italy's most influential environmentalists, including the World Wide Fund for Nature, are campaigning against the bridge, which they see as "damaging, useless and dangerous".
The European Parliament has given its support, but the European Commission is disturbed by Italy's bulging budget deficit.
The billionaire media tycoon is plugging on regardless. Last month, Berlusconi's Government invited bids to build the bridge, to be lodged by mid-July. The successful contractor will start building at the end of next year. When Berlusconi comes up for re-election in May 2006 those awesome anchor posts should already be rising.
The strait is a beautiful stretch of water. On each side the land ends abruptly - at one end Calabria and at the other the Sicilian city of Messina. Beyond the two headlands, high rolling mist-wreathed hills dissolve into the blue haze. Across the channel, ferries putter constantly, making the trip in 12 minutes.
Superimpose now on this ancient landscape the structure of Berlusconi's dream. It will be a thing of stupendous beauty; stretched so fine across the water that in the middle, seen from a distance, it will barely exist at all, merely a line drawn on the sky. From close up it will be a different story. The village of Torre Faro ("Lighthouse") is the last settlement on northeastern Sicily. . From among these modest streets of fishermen's terrace houses the pillars will rise.
The village, or so the villagers to whom I spoke claim, is united in opposition to the bridge. "We're all dead against it," said a youth in a tracksuit in the narrow main street. "You see that yellow house? That's where they're going to build the tower. But it's not going to happen soon. I think it will be 60 years before it gets built. Where are they going to find the money?"
A group of older men chatting near a boat yard were equally unenthusiastic. "It will destroy the village and the countryside around here," said one. "My house will be right underneath, it will block out the sun, there'll be no fresh air, just the fumes of the cars."
Another said: "There's no need for it. The ferries are quite enough for the traffic ... It will be dangerous in high winds. They're putting it right in an earthquake zone - Messina was destroyed by an earthquake in 1908."
The Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport claims the bridge will have no problem riding out a shock of 7.1 on the Richter scale lasting 30 seconds, comparable to the one that levelled Messina. Environmentalists say that quakes as strong as 8.9 have since been recorded in other places, and quakes lasting longer than 30 seconds have occurred in Italy.
And a report from Italy's National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment, says that a geological fault line runs through the strait, so the bridge's two anchor posts will pull in opposite directions.
Calabria, according to the report, is rising 2mm a year while Sicily is rising only half a millimetre.
In the event of an earthquake, the opposite sides of the bridge would tug against each other, it is claimed, widening the span by up to 50cm.
Project manager Pietro Ciucci dismissed such fears, saying that during the 30 years in which the bridge project has been studied all these factors had been taken into account. The "technical life" of the bridge, he said, "will be 200 years. After that, we'll think again."
The area is home to marine life unknown elsewhere. Protesters wrote some years back in an appeal to Unesco: "From ancient legends, from myths, from recent literature and poetry, this area has gained a significance that permeates the culture."
But the plea cuts little ice with a Government in love with grand gestures. Big infrastructural schemes had been a consistent theme for Berlusconi before his landslide election victory in 2001. In December that year his government committed itself to a 10-year programme of 220 public-works projects and investment of €26 billion. Of these the Messina bridge is the most grandiose.
Infrastructure matters to Berlusconi not merely because it is an old-fashioned way to kick-start the economy, but also because it is one vital measure of how different his administration is from the weak and fleeting governments of the past. The starting of work last year on the Venice lagoon floodgates, after decades of bickering, was one clear demonstration of that. The Messina bridge will be a much louder and more dramatic one.
In Berlusconi's vision the bridge will knit the backward and gangster-ridden island of Sicily into the "continente", as Sicilians term the mainland. The trains that run down the middle of the bridge will eventually, it is claimed, bring Palermo, the Sicilian capital, and Berlin within five hours of each other.
It may indeed help to reduce Sicily's insularity, though its opponents claim the traffic estimates have been inflated. Yet the most obvious immediate beneficiaries of the bridge will be the Sicilian Mafia. Cosa Nostra, as the gangsters are known, are as ubiquitous in Sicily as ever - with a finger in every pie, collecting protection money from every business and always keeping a weather eye out for promising new opportunities.
The Messina bridge, likely to cost at least €4.6 billion ($9.2 billion) and take six years to build, would be a Mafia business opportunity like no other. The Mafia has found it hard to get a foothold on the Italian mainland. It would be ironic if the bridge that was intended to bring Sicily out of backwardness instead enabled the gangsters to branch out into the mainland at last.
Has anybody seen the bridge? Where is that confounded bridge?
Twixt Scilla and Charybdis.
ping
This could be Hugh.
More pics here:
http://www.strettodimessina.it/pages/prog-e.html
I made a series mistake there.
This smells like another public works project for the "Mezzogiorno" (Southern Italy) that will satiate voters down there. I wish Berlusconi would at least couple this development with added pressure on local governors to crack down on corruption and encourage economic development of Calabria and Sicily. Unfortunately, old habits die hard down there, being a "family oriented" region and all.
Hey - datsa nuts!
Berlusconi looking for a legacy?
I can't find the bridge.
A man was walking along a California beach and stumbled across an old lamp. He picked it up and rubbed it and out popped a genie. The genie said, "OK, OK. You released me from the lamp, blah blah blah. This is the fourth time this month and I'm getting a little sick of these wishes so you can forget about three. You only get one wish!"
The man sat and thought about it for awhile and said, "I've always wanted to go to Hawaii but I'm scared to fly and I get very seasick. Could you build me a bridge to Hawaii so I can drive over there to visit?"
The genie laughed and said, "That's impossible. Think of the logistics of that! How would the supports ever reach the bottom of the Pacific? Think of how much concrete...how much steel! No, think of another wish."
The man said OK and tried to think of a really good wish. Finally, he said, "I've been married and divorced four times. My wives always said that I don't care and that I'm insensitive. So, I wish that I could understand women...know how they feel inside and what they're thinking when they give me the silent treatment...know why they're crying, know what they really want when they say nothing...know how to make them truly happy..."
The genie said, "You want that bridge two lanes or four?"
(Them's Kiwi dollars, pardner. US $ is more like five billion, altho it will probably cost three times that in the end. Look for the union label.)
Man, who's led a somewhat reckless life, finds a lamp on the beach, rubs it, out pops the genie.."OK..you get the usual three wishes, but because you've been an SOB all your life, there's a catch. Whatever you wish for, your WORST enemy, the person you DETEST the most on this planet, will receive TWICE what you wish for."
The guy thinks for a few moments, nods OK, then speaks:
"I'd like 10 beautiful women to satisfy all my sexual desires."
"OK, but your worst enemy will get 20 women.
"I'd like my male organ to double in size."
OK,then, but your WORST enemy, his organ will double, and double, again."
"I'd like to lose ONE testicle"
Those are some dumb gangsters. They've never heard of a boat or an airplane?
How are real estate prices in Calabria?
Maybe if the Europeans can do more projects like this they would pay more attention to their own homelands and get off our asses.
Those are some dumb gangsters. They've never heard of a boat or an airplane?
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