To rebuild a motorway bridge that fell four years ago because it was overrun by a landslide, but without securing the landslide itself. This is just the latest absurdity of the story of the Himera viaduct, 270 meters of reinforced concrete came down on April 10, 2015 at km 57 of the A19 Palermo-Catania, the main artery connecting the island. A collapse that split Sicily in two. And it’s been like that ever since, split. Incuracy, disorganization, bad business (five of them are on trial for this affair), bureaucracy, wrong construction sites, variants in the course of work, delays, lack of the slightest forecasting capacity, patches that risk being worse than the hole they have to fill. The Himera affair has everything.
But above all, the Morandino is a demonstration of how much damage a short-sighted management of the territory can generate, in total absence of the slightest coordination between institutions. Today, in fact, Anas is reconstructing the viaduct, but the Sicilian Region has not even announced the call to secure the landslide that caused its collapse, because it considers the intervention not its responsibility. Asked how to reopen a road over which a landslide hangs, Anas said: “The reconstruction project currently underway involves the completion of the works needed to restore the continuity of the A19 “Palermo-Catania” motorway, which is headed towards Catania, by means of a new three-light viaduct (instead of the original six bays).
However there are delays in implementation and bankruptcies of companies: the work, from 8 million euro, today is at 40% of its completion. Construction had started in May 2018 and was scheduled for completion in September 2019. " From May to now some critical issues have slowed the execution of work and the company has not been able to deliver the work within the terms-explained the secretary general Fillea CGIL Palermo, Piero Ceraulo, one of the few voices that has risen to draw attention to the absurd story – One of the conditions that led to the delay concerns the location of the site. The safety and restoration of the new viaduct has been slow due to the blockage of the ground, the landslide that caused the collapse and because the site is located on the bed of the Himera River.
Apart from Himara, it is all the A19 (and the Sicilian road network in general) to be very “wacky”, because it is badly maintained, when not maintained at all. So much so that in 2018 Anas launched in Sicily “an important plan of extraordinary maintenance of the network under our competence, in order to recover a maintenance gap caused by the scarcity of resources of the past years.
Already in the course of 2017, almost 100 million euros were spent on maintenance, doubling the expenditure of previous years and further increases in expenditure are expected in the coming years. Now, if Anas needs almost 900 million to bring the A19 back to safety standards “equal to other Italian motorways”, it means that it is now far below those standards. And so we have to thank the heavens that there was only one of Morandini. Until now.
Alessandro Macaluso, III M
