Anybody remember MOSE?

This is the city, so in need of protection and defense.

The division of history into the still-common categories of B.C. and A.D. is rendered in Italian as A.C. and D.C. (not to be confused with electric current or rock bands).  It stands for “Avanti Cristo” and “Dopo Cristo” (before and after Christ).

I’m going to propose we keep using A.C. and D.C., but now they’re going to stand for “Avanti Coronavirus” and “Dopo Coronavirus.”

Before Coronavirus, we had problems with tourism (which immediately became problems without tourism).  And we had acqua alta.  And we had MOSE, and still have MOSE, and will always have MOSE till eternity has been reduced to the nucleus of the hydrogen atom and is extinguished.

To recap:  Acqua alta is something that happens.  It can be extreme, and sometimes extremely damaging.  So it was decided, after the still-champion event of November 4, 1966, that the solution would be barriers composed of mobile “gates” that would be raised to block the water’s entrance into the lagoon, a/k/a Venice.  (I make that distinction because the MOSE people don’t care about the lagoon — it is being built to protect the city.  The damage that this construction has done and continues to do to the lagoon isn’t mentioned by the MOSE people, but it remains nevertheless.)

This is the lagoon, equally in need of protection and defense.  At dawn on a muggy morning in June, Lino is clamming, the tide is going out, and life is beautiful.  You’d never know that a world-class city was so close yet so detached.

How are things going?  Well, about as usual, which means moving ahead by fits and starts, badly and expensively.  This form of progress attracted notice from time to time until the catastrophic acqua alta on November 12, 2019 that simultaneously drowned and battered the city.  The morning after was full of wailing, as you would expect, and among those wails were angry voices saying that if MOSE had ever been finished on time (like, at least ten years ago) and in working order (this will always be doubtful), the city would not have suffered this appalling disaster.  The rough translation would be “Hey — those floodgates you all have been blowing smoke about for the last 30 years?  This is EXACTLY the situation they were intended to protect us from.  So where the f*#k are they already?”

Quick reply: “We’re on it!  June!  They’ll be done in June!”

So, good news: Being a major public work, its construction has not been blocked by the quarantine, though health security for the workers –staying at least one meter apart, in a tunnel under the water — is not easy.  And at the Lido/San Nicolo’ site, they don’t have protective gear at all.  But on we go.

Did I say “June 30”?  That’s when the installations are supposed to be complete.  Will they be working?  Unlikely.  They’re not going to be declared fully functional, ready for prime time, let’s cut the ribbon, until December 31, 2021.  The mayor is livid, and has generally made it known to the administrative body, the Consorzio Venezia Nuova (CVN), that this fall Venice is going to be facing high water again, and the gates better the f*#k be ready by then.

You know what’s coming next: Money.  We have none, and yet rivers of money keep flowing to all sorts of offices and individuals. One million euros have been spent so far on the “super-commissioner” assigned to oversee MOSE with her office/staff (engineers, lawyers, tech wizard, press officer).

Money also has to be found to pay the salaries of the 250 employees of the CVN and two associated entities.  And money has to be found to repair the many problems on the construction up till now, including modifying the special basin to allow ships to enter at Malamocco if the gates are raised.  The current basin, which cost 360,000,000 euros, not only was damaged by a storm in 2015, but has been found to be too small.

Yes indeed, there is still more:  The original project plan stipulated that the 78 gates have to be replaced every five years (five years after they begin working).  But there are gates that have already been lying underwater for more than five years — in the case of the ones at San Nicolo’-Treporti, since 2013.

But before replacement, there must be maintenance: cleaning, scraping off the heavy encrustations of barnacles and other clingy creatures, probably tasks aimed at gears and hydraulics, checking the condition of the tubes that carry the compressed air that powers the raising of the gates, etc.  The cost of maintenance?  Now projected to be 100,000,000 euros per year.  No, wait — it actually says “at least 100,000,000 a year.”

The news today reported that 40,000,000 euros have arrived in the city’s coffers of the 84,000,000 earmarked by the state to repair November’s devastation to the city and pay indemnities to businesses damaged by the acqua alta.  This is excellent news and comes none too soon, but then I look at the numbers.  It costs more to maintain the gates than it does to repair the city?

Now we hear about the cost of the consultants.  I suppose every project has consultants, though it’s not clear to me why, if you’ve already got professionals on the job in every category, you need to hire more.  A list was published in the Gazzettino on April 2 detailing monies spent in 2014 and 2019 in three areas: Administrative, Legal, and Technical.  “Administrative” includes three (3) special administrators paid 240,000 euros each.

In 2019, what with one thing and another, 3,000,000 euros were spent on consultants.  And about 2,000,000 of those were spent on lawyers.  So many things have gone wrong for so long that evidently you couldn’t have too many, and they all cost money.  One lawyer was paid 900,000 euros (admittedly he had plenty to do; he was employed by the  Consorzio, which was batting away lawsuits from suppliers and other offended parties like King Kong fighting the airplanes).

I may have said this before, but it’s worth repeating:  MOSE was supposed to save the city, but looking at these numbers, I’m beginning to think that somebody needs to save the city from MOSE.

Piazza San Marco, where the city and lagoon meet when the tide rises above 85 cm above mean sea level.  MOSE isn’t intended to prevent ANY water from coming ashore, just water above 110 cm.  That is, if it is ever completed, and the city can find the money to keep it in working order after all the consultants have been paid.

 

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MOSE: It’s just money

 

By this point, the mechanics and components of MOSE could only be interesting to engineers, and maybe not even to them.  So here are some pictures of the lagoon which do not show it at as the monstrous adversary against which Venice must be defended at all costs (“all costs” will be broken down below).

It’s not that I want to talk about MOSE any more than I want to gnaw off a hangnail, but it’s not my fault if wondrous developments continue to pop up in the endless saga of this undertaking.  And even if you are not a connoisseur of wondrousness (wondrosity?) in bloated public works, there may be a few people left who still are interested in how this thing is getting along.  By which I mean those people who used to ask me about it with such eagerness and curiosity and goodwill and hopefulness, seeing that until just a few years ago the Destiny of Venice was trumpeted by the press to be hand- and leg-cuffed to the success or failure of this … thing.

One recalls that the most recent date projected for finishing its construction (and beginning the TWO-YEAR TESTING) was the end of 2018.  But brace yourselves: It’s going to be later.  They say that the conclusion will be January 1, 2019. Or when the cassowaries return to Capistrano.  Or when Jesus comes back.  Everything depends on everything else, which is a fancy way of saying “money.”

“Creation of the animals,” by Tintoretto (c. 1550). It could be my imagination, but I detect a resemblance to the teeming Venetian lagoon here, which I suspect was not accidental.

Here is a rundown of the situation as outlined by Roberto Linetti (Interregional Superintendent of Public Works) to the city councilors a few days ago:

The job needs more money.  (I can’t comment on that anymore; it’s like saying the sun needs to come up tomorrow.) It needs 221 million euros — as do we all — to finance the completion of 60 remaining aspects of the project, 40 of which must be finished this year.  Only 40 million euros have been released from the total allotment so far, and the rapport between work done and payments made is not encouraging.

“The construction sites are not going well,” Mr. Linetti admitted.  Everything is slowing down because the private companies have slowed down, which they’ve done because of the financial and legal Gordianosities of the Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the former governing consortium, and its collapse under the weight of its financial skulduggery.  The companies have slowed down on working because payments due them are arriving even more slowly.  “If the private companies aren’t motivated to go ahead,” said Linetti, “it’s hard to make them go ahead, even by kicking them.”

But every day that the construction is stalled, the underwater parts are deteriorating, which will only require more expenditure down the line.  It’s a situation that brings to mind the notion that “We can’t stop fighting because otherwise our boys would have died for nothing.”

The MOSE annual budget also earmarks 15 million euros for caring for the lagoon (in unspecified ways).  Considering how much damage to the lagoon the whole project is causing, that seems fair.  Sort of.  Nice they remember there is a lagoon.

You know — this lagoon.

Projected cost of administration and maintenance.  This is a big one, which few people paid much attention to in the giddy days of selling contracts and all.

“We think that the administration of MOSE will cost about 80 million euros a year,” Linetti told the city councilors.  “And that’s not much for a work of this importance and complexity in an area like Venice, considering that between 20-30 million are solely the cost of the utilities for the system’s functioning.  Between 15-20 million euros a year will be for personnel, at least 100 of them.  Then there are 30-40 million for the maintenance itself,” including the undefined work in the lagoon.  Let me repeat that: The maintenance work itself will cost 30-40 million euros a year. “The State surely won’t fail to maintain its support.”

The maintenance work will be undertaken in the Arsenal, where the gates will periodically be brought to be cleaned, stripped and revarnished.  Naturally a new hangar will have to be constructed for this work, which will cost 18 million.  There are more zero’s swarming around the MOSE accounts than there are mosquitoes on Sant’ Erasmo at sunset in July.

Let the swans go live somewhere else, we’re busy operating big machinery and big bookkeeping programs.

And the use of the gates?   The news is now that to protect Venice from exceptional high tide, it will probably be necessary to raise only the gates at the inlet at San Nicolo on the Lido, leaving the gates at Malamocco and Chioggia peacefully reposing underwater.

“The experts have verified,” said Linetti, “that closing only the inlet at the Lido will result in a significant lowering of the level of the tide in the historic center, without the necessity of closing the entire system.”  So all that work and expense to build gates at all three inlets was…….pointless?

In fact, knowing that the Lido gates would be used the most frequently was the reason, according to Linetti, why more “materials” were dedicated to the construction there.  And therefore, he says, “There will be a saving on the costs of maintenance.”

He has now totally lost me. Where do these savings on maintenance come from? On the gates that will be used more often (theoretically), or those which therefore will be used less?  I could take high-powered binoculars and I still don’t see savings anywhere. At this point I’m not even sure what savings look like.

He’s looking for clams, not savings.

(I am indebted to the excellent reporting of Enrico Tantucci in La Nuova Venezia of 10 January 2018.)

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MOSE again, still, forever

If it weren’t for the lagoon, maybe people wouldn’t care quite so much about Venice. Interesting thought to ponder. But the lagoon would probably be better off without Venice, because then it wouldn’t be abused and tormented to make sure that Venice won’t have some water in the streets sometimes.

What everybody loves about Venice (among many things) is how old it is.  And that is indeed a thing to love.  I imagine all those amazing designers and builders and artists working away centuries ago, believing that their handiwork would last for, oh, maybe ever.  And because they were first-rate craftsmen, it turns out that most of them were right.

You might say that MOSE is also going to last forever, but not in a good way.  I don’t write updates on the continuing calamity that is the world’s most preposterous project because I’m bored by the mendacity, magnitude and monotony of the problems.  Everything has gone, is going, and will be going, wrong with this thing until Jesus comes back, so updates are pointless.  In fact, I’ve begun to suspect that the whole thing started with a bunch of drunk people sitting around one summer afternoon on some rich person’s yacht or private mountain, who decided to break the boredom by inventing a game in which the winner is the one who finds a way to waste the most money on the most pointless enterprise in the history of the world.  If you can call it “winning.”  Bonus points for environmental damage, or if somebody dies.

But the latest headlines have barged into my brain and made me think about it again, if only briefly, and my thoughts are not lovely.  I can sum it up for you:  Yet more things have been discovered to be screwed up, and fixing them will cost lots more money.  This has become the refrain of the Marching Song of the MOSE Squadron, while the bass singers set the jaunty rhythm “Money for me, money for me, money for me…..”  And as you read, consider (as I have) that if I had done the calculations, it’s obvious they would have come out all wrong.  But I am not a civil engineer (I’m hardly civil at all) and I do not have a piece of paper from some institute which implies that I have studied how to do this work.  But we must face the fact that the perpetrators of all this have such certificates.

Is there something about water that just baffles engineers in Venice? They ought to be experts, yet somehow the smallest details are just left unfixed. One might say that the flow of the water and/or the position of the grate of this fountain don’t really HAVE to match up, but then one considers the possibility that the designer was later hired to work on MOSE.

Here’s the headline on September 

MOSE, the gate of the lock at Malamocco has to be redone.

I will translate the main points in this and the following article:

The gate on the lock basin (“conca“) at Malamocco has to be redone.  After the 400 million euros already spent, another 20 million will have to be invested for the “lunata,” the semi-circular breakwater shaped like the moon which protects the ships from waves and current as they position themselves to enter or as they exit.

Here is the inlet between the Adriatic (to the right) and the lagoon (to the left). It’s sort of like two boxers facing off  before the gong. Clockwise from “lunata” we find: The construction yard of the caissons for MOSE, the tiny hamlet of Santa Maria del Mare, the lock to permit shipping to pass when the floodgates are closed in the inlet, the nature park at the Alberoni, the inlet which will be blocked by the raised floodgates in the case of exceptional high tide, and the Alberoni seawall.

The lock, you may recall, was dug to permit the passage of ships between the Adriatic and the lagoon whenever the floodgates are raised.  But evidently every good idea contains the seeds of its own destruction, if you play it right.  It was constructed in 2007 by the Consorzio Venezia Nuova (by means of the mega-company Mantovani) and designed by Technital ten years ago, which Vitucci recalls as  “the golden age of MOSE, when money poured in without limits and without too much control.”  But even then the design was clearly flawed, for which almost everybody involved is now paying the consequences.

Inadequate.  Even though the breakwater extends 1300 meters (4,265 feet), its basin is too small for the latest generation of container ships, making it too risky for the big ships to attempt to enter the lock.  Other than that, the “mobile” parts of the lock — the gates — cannot function because the water exerts too much pressure.  The persons making those calculations might have been interrupted by a phone call, or the arrival of a pizza; anyway, it doesn’t work. This problem was discovered in 2015 when the gate gave way in the first storm.  Urgent interventions are now in the hands of a Belgian company.

But not to worry!  The president of the Magistrato alle Acque, Roberto Linetti, says that fixing it will only cost 18 million euros because the foundations are still good.  And meanwhile, they’ll be able to add a few meters to allow the ships to pass. So you see?  In the end, it was a good thing the gate didn’t work.

Infinite.  Or “unfinished.”  Or “unfinishable,” perhaps.  What now bears the tired title of the “MOSE scandal” consists, as Vitucci lists it, of: “Bribes and consultants, off-the-books payments and always-positive evaluations rendered by friendly experts, extra costs due to the lack of competition and the necessity of accumulating “black” (untraceable) funds to pay the bribes.  But also there have been obvious errors, such as the lock. What was intended to be a structure to prevent penalizing the port activity when the floodgates were up has been shown to be, at the end, the umpteenth useless big project.

Waste.  The lock is far from being the only problem — there are the collateral “major works” connected to MOSE, each one of which is its own little one-act tragedy. The “jack-up,” the large “ship” which cost 50 million euros for transporting and moving the gates constructed by Comar and Mantovani, remains anchored at the Arsenal and has never been used because it doesn’t function, despite the repairs that have been made. There is also the damage to the seawall at San Nicolo’ on the Lido, which collapsed a few days after it had been tested.  Tens of millions of euros thrown into the sea, as Vitucci (and probably many others) puts it.  Damages will need to be paid for all those, too, but it’s not clear by whom.

This is the “jack-up.” Big, expensive, impressive, it makes no pretense of working.

But wait!  There’s more!  Is anyone wondering how the various components are managing to resist encrustation and mold?  I can tell you!  But before I do, pause to marvel at the astonishing presence of salt in seawater, not to mention algae and all sorts of cretures which insist on attaching themselves to things. Who could possibly have known, or even guessed at random, that the Adriatic contains salt and water?

The headline in the Nuova Venezia on September 7, 2017, on a story written by Alberto Vitucci:

Mold and degradation, the MOSE gates are already blocked. 

“Big works = big mafias.” I don’t usually agree with graffiti, but this sums up the situation with admirable clarity.

The encrustation is increasing; the paint is already old.  And without electricity it’s impossible to raise the barriers.  Mold and degradation in the corridors of the caissons beneath the lagoon.  And the gates, exposed for six months to the weather and salt at Santa Marina del Mare, have to be repainted.

The installations.  The latest problem is the delay in building the electric plant to raise the gates.  MOSE needs energy to raise the gates because it doesn’t exploit the natural energy of the sea and waves.  … Unlike the sequence of events at San Nicolo’, where the power plant was installed first, at Malamocco it was decided to position the gates on the lagoon bottom before the power plant was built.  Result: For several months the gates have lain on the bottom but it’s impossible to test raising them.

Corrosion and fouling. The first inspections revealed corrosion and encrustation.  The lack of electricity has prevented the correct ventilation underwater where the cables and systems pass, not to mention the workers.  The walls are covered with a layer of mold 5 centimeters (2 inches) deep. MOSE is a system conceived to remain underwater, and without maintenance, the problems multiply, such as the corrosion of the hinges (of the gates) that was reported several months ago. What to do? The Consorzio Venezia Nuova announced a competition for bids on the construction of the systems.  Two groups won, the Abb Comes of Taranto and the Abb Idf of Brindisi. But the proposal to realize some temporary systems to move the gates wasn’t approved.  It would have cost 14 million euros, so just let the gates sit underwater, blossoming.

Several months ago, the gates underwater at Treporti began to show accumulations of barnacles, mussels, and crabs — sea-dwelling creatures which were not exactly unknown before the work started.

The paint is peeling. Because there is no electricity or apparatus to install them, the 30 gates that were supposed to be lowered into the water have been waiting for months on the construction site of the caissons.  The delay is due to the non-functioning of the “jack-up.” (Some gates were constructed in Croatia and brought across the Adriatic from Split.)  During these months, the workers have battled the weather and the seagulls, which have begun to nest in the gates, as follows…..

MOSE: Even the seagulls are stripping the paint.

Information from the article by Alberto Vitucci, La Nuova Venezia, 29 April 2017

It turns out that the beached (so to speak) gates sitting at the construction site are a very attractive home for nesting seagulls, sort of like LeFrak City for waterfowl.  But their guano is damaging the paint, and eventually corrodes the metal too.  The birds stab at the peeling paint with their beaks, trying to strip it off (boredom? sport? snacks?).  Protective tarpaulins have been spread over the gates, but large spaces have been left open for work on the hinges, so ….

Bring on the scarecrows! (I mean gulls): Deafening recordings of frightening sounds.  They tried an amped-up donkey braying because an ethologist said that birds are afraid of it.  Birds, sure, but not gulls, who fear almost nothing anymore.  Next, a high-volume dog growling. Nope. In the end, the only thing that works is a cannon firing blanks, so cannonfire is now periodically heard in the lagoon, followed by the wild flapping of hundreds and hundreds of wings of birds that soon return.

How long will all this be going on?

The timetable.  According to the latest schedule — after deadlines passed from 2011 to 2014, then 2017, then 2018 — the work will be finished by 2021.  Four (or five or ten?) more years of astonishing stories to come.  And I haven’t even said anything about the subsidence of the lagoon bottom beneath the caissons due to the powerful force of the tides (tides? there are tides in the sea? what??) which appear to be distorting the position of the gates…..

Life on earth requires many adjustments. Shown here is a reasonable solution to a problem. I have no images of a reasonable solution to any of MOSE’s problems.

 

 

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MOSE: drastic surgery

This is also the lagoon.
This is also the lagoon.

I promise that I will not transform this blog into the daily bulletin from the MOSE hecatomb.

But two days ago (June 14), at the last meeting of the council of ministers, the government did something so extreme — and indisputably necessary and long overdue — that I want at least to make it known.

They abolished the Magistrato alle Acque.  An entire government agency with 500 years of history is no more.  Yesterday it was, today it is not.

Beginning in October, its responsibilities will be “absorbed” by the Inter-regional Director of Public Works of the three contiguous regions of the Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia, and Trentino Alto Adige.

Of course this is good, but I feel sick at heart.  Not only because of the annihilation of one of the last tiny links to the Venetian Republic, but because a gesture of this magnitude shows all too vividly the extent of the rot.

People who occasionally had to request a permit for temporary use of a certain stretch of lagoon have long been aware that the Magistrato was as swampy as Reelfoot Lake.  It wouldn’t have been the first city agency whose functionaries accepted the occasional guerdon for speeding up the processing of requests.  I’m not saying the employees of the Magistracy did such a thing.  I’m just saying that if they did, they wouldn’t have been alone.

The MOSE work has made the tides stronger and faster, so the fish are having to work harder at their annual migrations.
The MOSE work has made the tides stronger and faster, which has affected plants, fish and, I presume, also birds. But the floods of water are nothing compared to the floods of payoffs.

The Magistracy of the Waters was established in 1501; it was specifically charged with overseeing the health and security of the lagoon, and any action required — digging, land reclamation, maintenance — had to have its approval.

Care of the lagoon required care of its tributary rivers, too.  Venetian engineers diverted the Po River, for God’s sake; between 1600 and 1604, innumerable men with shovels and wheelbarrows cut Italy’s greatest river at Porto Viro and turned it southward.  There were many reasons for this, some of them political, some economic, but it was also time to limit the amount of sediment that was filling up the lagoon.  The Venetian Republic knew that the care of the lagoon was its primary life insurance.

“Lagoon” (laguna) is a Venetian word, by the way.

But the Magistrato was populated by many individuals who were not all of the same stripe, and in 1678, human nature having demonstrated its impressive dimensions, the Venetian Senate created a group of inquisitors to conduct the legal cases against those accused of having damaged the lagoon.  There must be some diabolical hothouse somewhere that causes little tiny crook seedlings to sprout, then sells them to the Magistrato alle Acque where, in its own special microclimate, they can flourish and grow to be big tall leafy crooks.

In fact, I now learn that this is the third time that the Magistrato has been “suppressed,” as the headlines put it, though it’s the first occasion where the reason was crime.

In 1808, during the brief but eventful French domination of the city (1806-1814), the Viceroy Eugene Beauharnais put an end to it, for reasons I haven’t yet discovered. It didn’t take long for it to become evident that this was an error, the neglect having contributed to an assortment of watery damage.  When the Austrians took over for the first time (1816-1848), they quickly re-established the Magistrato, reorganized it, renamed some departments, applied a coat of varnish and it was good to go again.

In 1866, when Venice and the Veneto became part of the new nation of Italy, the Magistrato was annulled again, and again a series of hydraulic disasters showed what serious consequences could come from indifference to the state of the waterways.

The Magistrato was reformulated for the third time in 1907 as part of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, and its authority expanded to cover the entire hydrological basin of northeast Italy — an enormous watershed of rivers, lakes, and other lagoons stretching from Mantova to Trieste.  Total area of its authority was some 40,000 square kilometers (15,000 square miles).  So when we talk about the misfeasance of the Magistrato, we’re not talking about some little local entity that turned out to have just a few bad apples.

I very sincerely hope that Cuccioletta and Piva, in their respective cells awaiting trial, are happy.  Because I’m not, and neither are a whole bunch of other people.

This is a relatively recent lion, and he looks like he's had more than enough of all this.
This is a relatively recent lion, and he looks like he’s had more than enough of all this.

 

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