THE CASE

From You, Our Italy, WWF, Legambiente and Man urge the government to stop work considered dangerous, unnecessary and harmful to the environment. The technical surveys to the project in more than 200 pages of comments. "Take immediate action to prevent criminal" by VALERIO Gualerzi

ROME - If it is true that not every silver lining, the economic crisis and the arrival of a government technical substitution policy can perhaps be an opportunity to store a project once and for all considered crazy as the one on the bridge over the Straits. This is at least the hope of environmental groups Fai, Italy Nostra, WWF, Legambiente and Man (Mediterranean Association for Nature) than in the past few days have written precisely with this objective in a letter to Prime Minister Mario Monti.

The initiative was presented this morning in Rome along with a detailed "counter-report" which mercilessly reminded of the many critical aspects of the project and often even paradoxical. Well 245 pages of observations that organizations have produced, how they write the same prime minister, "under the special procedure for environmental impact assessment for strategic infrastructure." Said out of reverent bureaucratic language used in the letter, the basic issue for the ecological associations is that the bridge is dangerous because it would be a gamble engineering accomplished in one of the most seismic areas of the Mediterranean, it is useless from an infrastructure point of view of mobility and promoting economic development, and costs a blunder, 8.5 billion euros, which could be used in a much more profitable, represents a threat landscape and environment, both for the impact

which will be the opening of dozens of sites on both sides of the Straits, both for the migration of millions of birds (4.3 were those surveyed in the air in just a month and a half to radar).

Old objections, which are repeated for years, but for their paradoxical never cease to amaze. It is worth to mention a few: the Strait of Messina Bridge, Please remember, Our Italy, WWF, Legambiente and Man in their observations, have a span of 3.3 km long, while the longest in the world (Akashi Kaikyo, Japan) is only 1.9, km. The Japanese Bridge, however, the road only, while that between Reggio and Messina should be both road and rail. To build it, according to the designers, would be sufficient just 6 years old, while Akashi Kaikyo well but needed 12. The sites for the work on the Sicilian side also occupy a space of over three thousand football fields, while on the Calabrian it would be sufficient "only" half.

Just because these are issues that environmentalists complain for some time, rather than on the rationality of these comments, the final hope of a stop work now focus on the general economic situation of the country. "We must strike the key of the waste which would be the bridge in a dramatic moment like the present," said the president of Legambiente Vittorio Cogliati Dezza. Not by chance to give strong hand in this campaign, was present at the press conference a small group of parliamentarians from different political forces, the Pd UDC, Fli by the Radicals. "The Bridge is a failed project and incompatible with the current economic phase that the country lives - such as the futurist says Fabio Granata - alone represents a cost of more than one third of the last maneuver Mountains." The Democratic Francesco Ferrante instead emphasizes another aspect of the particular contingency: "Just because that is a caretaker government in office - he says - I hope that does not have an ideological position and stop the project through the institutional assessment of environmental impact."

In their letter to Monti, as mentioned in the press conference, then the associations denounced the incompleteness of the project prepared by the Strait of Messina SpA (concessionary public spaces) and Eurolink (General contractor), a document cost 66 million euros of public funds but "can not be considered definitive" given the many shortcomings and approximations. This is an extremely important point, because if the decisive battle on the possible penalties. According to environmentalists, forcing a stop work hours, the State would not be bound to any outlay not only because the project is not final, but also because the clause fixing the presentation of the project as the final act by which you can pull back represents "an alteration of ex post requirement to race."

But it is essential, Stefano Lenzi of WWF concluded that "the government avoids the point of 'no return' discards the start of the final design and construction" to avoid having to pay 56 million for the project executive and 425 million for "the 'Start of even a single yard. " To give further strength to this battle, so environmental groups have also submitted a formal notice to the Commission for Environmental Impact Assessment and started a petition to request the dissolution of the Strait of Messina SpA, the only act that would definitely write an end the whole story.