Italy yesterday inaugurated a sleek new bridge in Genoa, although relatives of the 43 people killed when the old viaduct collapsed said the pomp and ceremony risk overshadowing the tragedy.
Jets trailing the colors of the Italian flag were to roar overhead as the national anthem plays, almost two years to the day the Morandi highway gave way during heavy rain, hurling dozens of cars and several trucks onto railway tracks below.
Italian President Sergio Mattarella was to be the first to officially cross the new bridge, designed by famed Italian architect Renzo Piano, who gave it a curved, gleaming underbelly evoking the hull of a ship in tribute to Genoa’s maritime history.
Photo: Reuters
The names of the victims were to be read aloud, although many of their loved ones would not be present.
“We won’t be at the inauguration, we don’t want the tragedy to be transformed into a carnival,” said Egle Possetti, whose sister died in the Aug. 14, 2018, disaster, along with her husband and their two children.
“You can have this sort of big party if you knock down the bridge because it’s old, you build a new one, and no one’s died,” she said.
The Morandi bridge had been riddled with structural problems for decades, leading to expensive maintenance, and its collapse threw the spotlight on Italy’s creaking infrastructure.
The tragedy also ended the longstanding concession of highway maintenance by a company majority-owned by the powerful Benetton family.
The new high-tech structure will have four maintenance robots running along its length to spot weathering or erosion, as well as a special dehumidification system to limit corrosion.
It is expected to open to traffic today or tomorrow.
Piano, a Genoa native whose building designs include The Centre Pompidou in Paris and The Shard in London, has described his new creation as a “child born of tragedy.”
“It was horrific. I remember the sounds, the smells, terrible things,” said Silvano Ruffoni, one of the first paramedics on the scene when, at just after 11:30am, about 250m of the vast concrete structure crumbled into the void.
“We were met by such an atrocious sight. The bridge was gone. We were thunderstruck,” he said in an interview last week with the local daily Il Secolo XIX.
The new viaduct, he said, was “a sign of rebirth.”
However, Possetti, who is a spokeswoman for a victims’ relatives group, said she would “never cross that bridge.”
“How could you be there and not think of everything that happened, and that destroyed your family,” she said.
The Morandi was hailed a marvel of engineering when it opened in 1967, but an investigation into the disaster found it was neglected.
Autostrade, which runs almost half of Italy’s motorway network, has been accused of failing to maintain it properly, amid allegations of falsified safety reports and in-house pressure to slash maintenance costs.
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