MOSE | Venice: I am not making this up

Moving forward, backward, in circles?

April 15, 2022 12 Comments

Too many corners? This street will take you somewhere. It might be the “where” you want to be, or maybe not.

I had an interesting dream last night, set in Venice; nothing particular happened but I did awaken with this thought: It’s not the canals that make Venice so particular (special, different, beautiful, strange, etc.), it’s the corners.

Why is that? Because there are so incredibly many of them, and when you turn one, or two, or more, you either move ahead or you somehow find yourself pretty much back where you started.

That’s my new metaphor for Venice. As far as I can tell, after the enormous difficulties and turmoil caused by two years of Covid, somehow it seems that we’re back where we started. You might think that could be a good thing (“Back to normal!”) except that it’s not (“Back to normal!”). Things keep happening, but almost nothing really changes. Names change occasionally, but the headlines seem to be set on “replay.”

There are now fewer than 50,000 Venetians living in the historic center of Venice. (In 2021, there were 50,434). This is a threshold many people dreaded crossing, but it has been crossed nonetheless. I have no idea what this means in real life, because supermarkets continue to open. Who are their customers?

This place was a furniture and upholstery shop when we moved here. Then it became a bar/cafe/slot machine parlor. Then the “acqua granda” decimated it in 2019 and it has remained this way till now.

Then, just a week or so ago, suddenly there was activity.

It’s going to be a very large supermarket dedicated to shampoo, detergent, cosmetics, also potato chips and beer. Just what we few who live here were needing? We already have two supermarkets and a shampoo/detergent shop. Stand by for the struggle for survival of the smaller, family-run detergent emporium and this megalodon.

This store is already separating itself from the family-run shop several doors down: It will be open continually (no mid-day closing for lunch or a nap or anything like that), and it will be open on Sunday, when the family is at home taking a break like normal people. I am not happy.

Here’s a wonderful sight, though: Imagine my delight at seeing a truly useful shop open up. A barber named Mohammed took over the space of the defunct laundromat, victim of the acqua granda. The space sat empty for two years, then suddenly the classic rotating barber-pole appeared. I really hope Mohammed makes it. There must be at least one tourist who’ll need a haircut between spritzes.

When the mayor uses the term “Venice,” he is referring to the general metropolitan entity, the preponderance of which is on the mainland. Everybody knows he really only cares about the mainland: “The future of Venice,” he said openly, “is Mestre.” Take that, Venice-lovers! The future of Milwaukee may well be Sheboygan, but to someone who thinks of the Piazza San Marco when he/she hears “Venice,” Mestre is a bit much. Still, this is how it’s going. Eight of the ten city councilors are from the mainland. The ninth is in Venice itself, the tenth lives on the Lido. And of course the mayor too is from the mainland, where he has business interests. So voices speaking up for the dwindling historic center are faint and few.

Meanwhile, daily life is made up of stores closing, stores opening. Unpredictable transit strikes and all-too-predictable wailing by ACTV, we have no money we have no money. Tourists: We want them, but they’re making us crazy. The sudden drought of Russian tourists has torn a new hole in the city’s financial fabric.

Cruises: Big ships are banished from the Bacino of San Marco. The cruise ships will enter the lagoon at Malamocco, toiling like container ships up to the raggedy docks in the commercial port zone of Marghera.

The MSC “Sinfonia” opened the season by docking at Marghera on April 9, the first of the 200 cruises scheduled for this year. Sound good? Not when you compare it to the 565 cruises that stopped (or started) in Venice in 2019. But those days are gone.

MOSE: There will never be anything new to say about this. Work stopped, problems found, money gone, problems found, money arrives, work starts again, problems found, date of completion always on the horizon.

The thing is that headlines blurt out news that any Venetian already knew years ago. Example: Barnacles. Lino mentioned the inevitability of barnacle encrustation to me back in 1994. It would be impossible to astonish anybody who has kept a boat in the water here. This is as much a fact as that water is wet.

Still, somebody finally noticed the problem. In 2018, an article announced the discovery by an underwater drone that the MOSE barriers were rusting and encrusted with barnacles. Time passes, nothing is done. In 2022, another headline: Barnacles!! Or to be even more precise: Mussels.

The Guardia di Finanza disseminated a brief video showing this little voyage of discovery a few days ago. I can’t estimate how many tons of mollusks have attached themselves to the gates, but I can tell you that their weight is going to have a very serious effect on the gates’ functioning.

Turns out that the gates that have been lying in their assigned position underwater awaiting the call to block the tide have not been receiving the required and agreed-upon maintenance. The money for maintenance was allotted some time back, but it seems to have not been spent on maintenance. If the crud was predictable, so was the fate of the maintenance money.

Years ago, the cost of annual maintenance was forecast to be some 15 million euros. Then estimates of maintenance costs rose to 80 million euros, and now they’re projected to be 200 million euros per year. Where do these numbers come from? Are they breeding in dark corners, like wire hangers? In any case, vast amounts of money can’t ever sit still long enough to be spent on what they’re supposed to be spent on. When you actually need the money, somehow it’s just not there anymore.

There’s no need to read headlines, this has been going on for generations now. The big hold-back-the-tide project began in 1973, when the Special Law for Venice allotted money for a competition for designs (held in 1975). When the first stone was laid in 2003, the end was promised for 2010. We were all so young, so innocent… Then the 2014 deadline came and went, then the middle of 2018, then the beginning of 2019. The “acqua granda” of November 2019 broke several financial logjams, and work picked up with the promise of concluding in 2021. Sorry, I meant 2023. Endless years pass of “We’ll get there! Give us more money!” Lack of funds closed the works for the entire year of 2021. Rome sends millions, then more millions. And yet, somehow there is never enough.

Tourism: They’re baaaaack. Intermittently, and more often on weekends, still more often just during the day. There were a few Carnival crush-fests in the San Marco area, but nothing noteworthy. I suppose it just wouldn’t be Venice without 100,000 or more visitors in a day. And just now, on the cusp of the Easter weekend, we are back under siege again.

This is supposed to be good (even as we see the interminable lines at the vaporetto stops for boats to Murano and Burano). Venice has got to get back in the game, seeing as it’s the only game there is.

Venice isn’t the only Italian city to take a major hit from the pandemic, but I am not seeking comparisons. There were 8,800,000 visits in 2019; 2,500,000 in 2020, and a little more than 3,200,000 in 2021. Between May and August of 2021 (peak summer season) the arrivals were 54 percent fewer than in 2019.

Last January I glimpsed that a return to normal tourist business was imminent when I passed the dry cleaning shop and saw piles of hotel-room drapes.

Now vaporettos are back to being jammed with people and luggage. True, this is a holiday weekend, but the crush has become more noticeable over the past two months.

Fancy bags from fancy stores show that some of the tourists with money are returning. Too bad the Russians are gone; they’d been increasing over the years to be among the top spenders in the tourist cavalcade (fourth after Japanese, Chinese, and Canadians), spending an average of 145 euros per person per day in 2018. And they loved the many-starred hotels; almost 40 per cent of Russians stayed in the fancy hostelries.

Italian tourists are forecast to increase by 35 percent over last year, and foreign tourists will be up 43 percent. If they all went to Dior, how great would that be.

Maybe these bottles were prepared for the now-missing Russians? Stunned by a wine that costs 900 euros ($972), I discover that Solaia is produced in the Chianti Classico area and is considered “among the most influential wines in the history of Italian viticulture.” The other two bottles suddenly seem so much more approachable. Yet if there is one thing — or three — that say “tourist,” it has to be these. Have them delivered to my yacht.

And speaking of bottles, there are these little containers of unknown substances. Of course there ought to be something on sale for everybody, but the city is promising to clamp down on the shops selling the cheap tchotchkes aimed at the average yobbo. I doubt that this item will make it onto their radar, though. They’re on the lookout for cheap masks and little bobbing battery-run gondolas for your bookshelf.

Suddenly the now-reopening businesses and hotels are scrambling to find staff. The Bar Torino in Campo San Luca is looking for a woman or man to work the bar — experience required.

Waiters!! “We are seeking personnel for the (dining) room. Send your CV via email….or leave it inside! Age between 20 and 30 years old.” Evidently age requirements aren’t forbidden by law; if they were, I don’t suppose the proprietor would be so upfront about how much he prefers people in their 20s.

“Lacking chambermaids, war breaks out between hotels.” I say “chambermaid,” though maybe there are men who also clean and set up hotel rooms. But 70 percent of workers associated with tourism are women.

Unloading bags of flour at the bread bakery is another sign of the touristic return. People buy bread, sure, but restaurants and bars buy more.

Last year sometime there was a brief quiver of excitement over the resurrected idea of installing turnstiles to control the flow of tourists entering the city at certain points. That idea has been mothballed. I think we don’t want to slow them down. The eternal subject of the selling a ticket to enter Venice has also been put aside. But these ideas will be back. They’re like the swallows going to Capistrano.

One huge drawback to the renting of apartments to tourists is their garbage. Many owners leave instructions about when to leave it out for collection (on our street, the trashmen come by between 8:10 and 8:25 AM). But if for some reason you put it out much earlier, even the night before, this is what greets the dawn. Seagulls can smell your pizza box and coffee grounds and they will rip the plastic bag to shreds.

Pigeons are also fans but they don’t get a chance till the seagulls have finished.

There are two tourist-rental apartments on our tiny stretch of street. I understand that if you have a flight that leaves at 6:30 AM, you’re going to put it out when you go. Then again, there are people who put it out at 9:00 because they want to sleep late. The trashmen are not amused but they can’t leave it there.

Biennale: Yes, it is opening this year — April 23 to November 27 — and the vibrations are palpable. The small park on the Riva dei Sette Martiri tends to host more light-hearted works. I’ll just call them “works,” because I can’t bring myself to say “art.” I honestly don’t know what they are.

So here we are, caught in the endless cycle of everything. Maybe there will be something new around the next corner (or ten), but I’m not counting on it.

My vision of a perfect world: Nothing fancy, everybody getting along, nobody trying to get anywhere.

Problems, Venetian Problems

Meanwhile, in other news….

July 17, 2021 3 Comments

Now that the G20 has come and gone, the surface of life that was so agitated thereby has returned to its normal level of agitation. There are plenty of things to keep track of, to one degree or another. In some cases, to many degrees.

Here are a few of them:

REDENTORE: The annual feast of the Most Holy Redeemer is tonight and Sunday — the big waterborne festivities on Saturday, the races and big religious celebration on Sunday. Last year there were no fireworks, which left a huge hole in the festivities. This year there will be fireworks, but in a serious effort to prevent the hazardous clumping-together of crowds the city has imposed a limit of 18,000 people, total, and those persons have to have made a reservation. To reach the place or area they’ve booked, they have to show their printed ticket as well as their “Green Pass,” or other certificate of vaccination, OR a document that confirms that their swab was negative within the 48 preceding hours.

The obverse side shows my name, birth date, and a few other details not interesting to anyone but them and me. This document allows me to travel to other European countries without having to quarantine.

Barriers are being set up around the reservation-only zones. Here, this fence ought to keep the traffic lanes separated. If Carnival is any example, it won’t.

These barriers are intended to prevent people falling in the water, I suppose; maybe they should prevent people in boats trying to board somebody or put them ashore?

The rules are the ones that we all know so well by now: Masks and distancing. Tickets have been organized in sub-sectors. Redentore used to be a real let-it-all-fly sort of festa; a party now where everyone will have to behave like Captain Von Trapp’s children is going to be really different.

Boats obviously won’t be permitted to tie up to each other: social distancing afloat. No trying to pass from boat to boat. No dancing parties aboard (take that, you big floating discotheques). The watery areas are delimited according to size and the use of boat, and you have to show a printed “ticket” from your booking (on water as on land) to be permitted to enter the area. Once your boat has entered its appointed area, it is forbidden to exit, nor will it be permitted to put people ashore. Boat captains have to keep a complete list of passengers for 14 days. Also, wear your mask.

There are regulations for people booking space along the fondamentas to watch the fireworks, or to scarf their dinner, but I’m not going to go into all that. If you’ve booked a space, you already have the rules. If you haven’t booked, you’d better hop to. Preference is being given to Venetians, it says here.

Lino and I will not be there; it’s been years since we decided we couldn’t stand the mayhem of the motorboats in the dark, with their drunk drivers. We might walk up to the fondamenta dei Sette Martiri (where I didn’t see any signs of assigned places) if it’s not too crazy.

The little yellow slice, Area 5 Dogana, is the space allotted to traditional boats, either rowed or with a motor of maximum 9.9 hp. The other zones are organized for boats according to size and use (pleasure, work, etc.). No need to get into all the details. Note the white emergency exits. When Lino was a boy, the Giudecca Canal was so thickly covered with boats — all propelled by oars, of course — you could walk across them from one bank to another. And they were all massed in the Giudecca Canal to the west of the votive bridge, up toward the Molino Stucky. The Bacino of San Marco was just background decoration.

THE BIG SHIPS: Ship-haters rejoice: As of August 1, the biggest ships will no longer be permitted to pass through the city. These ships are defined as having at least one of the following characteristics: Gross tonnage above 25,000 tons; hull at the waterline longer than 180 meters; height of ship more than 35 meters, excluding ships that are motor- and sail-driven; use of fuel in maneuvering that has a percentage of sulfur equal or superior to 0.1 per cent. Like any other cargo vessel, the big cruise ships will be routed from Malamocco to Porto Marghera, one of many solutions that have been discussed since dinosaurs roamed the earth. But this is just a stopgap. The real solution is the offshore port, and that’s not happening tomorrow.

Seeing that neither Porto Marghera nor anywhere else will be ready this year, the MSC Orchestra or Magnifica and Costa Deliziosa (the only big ships on the dance card this summer) will be departing, respectively, from Monfalcone and Trieste, up along the northern Adriatic coast. Passengers arriving in Venice will be swabbed or otherwise health-checked at the Venice Maritime area, then loaded on buses and driven a few hours to their ships. So much for the thrill of cruising from Venice.

The offshore port project is going to take some time. Phase One, send in your proposals by December 31, 2021. Make sure your design can accommodate modern container ships as well as the biggest cruise ships, and make sure the port will be safe in stormy seas because there won’t be any lagoon to protect you anymore. Phase Two, five experts evaluate the proposals. Phase Three, choose the winner. That decision will be made by June 30, 2023, if all goes as planned. That’s a pretty big “if,” I feel compelled to add.

Seeing that creating the offshore port will take at least five to six years, Porto Marghera will have to be modified fairly quickly. Building the new passenger terminal there, deepening the channels and revising the current industrial docks will cost 157 million euros — a hefty sum for a temporary set-up. Then again, “temporary” has a flexible meaning here. The Accademia Bridge was built in 37 days in 1933 as a temporary structure while proposals for the real bridge were to be evaluated, and it’s still there.

I have the impression that the sudden decision on dealing with the big ships is linked somehow to the fact that UNESCO recently decided to designate the water entrance to Venice — Bacino of San Marco, Canale of San Marco and the Giudecca Canal a national monument. This is surprising in that UNESCO, when it listed Venice as a World Heritage Site in 1987, specifically included the lagoon. You wouldn’t know that by the savaging of the environment that has gone on since then, but anyway, I’d have considered the Bacino, etc. as part of the lagoon. Now it’s a national monument. Okay then.

Spare a thought, though, for the humans — 1,260 direct workers and 4,000 indirect workers — involved in what will be a radical restructuring of the whole shipping enterprise here. Many are fearing for their jobs.

Almost no workers believed that this decree would come so fast, and right in the middle of the season. The maritime agencies are also worried. Every shipping company is required by law to engage a maritime agency, but, says Michele Gallo, head of two agencies, “You can’t even think of having the same ships as before coming to the docks at Porto Marghera, using the same places as the commercial ships. This is a devastating decree.” Organizing the entry, passage and departure of so many ships through the inlet at Malamocco and along the Petroleum Canal (Canale dei Petroli) is going to be a job worthy of an air traffic controller.

By the way, all this increased traffic will make it even more important to keep the aforementioned channel dredged. However, the deeper the channel, the faster the tide enters and exits, and already this action removes millions of cubic meters of sediment from the lagoon every year. Everyone knows that the Canale dei Petroli has thus caused incalculable damage to the lagoon and its extraordinary ecosystems. Ironic that UNESCO decided to designate part of the lagoon as a national monument with the notion of protecting it, but they seem not to have taken into account the effect so much extra traffic will have in a channel that essentially behaves as if it were a water vacuum sucking the soil from the lagoon.

This was the lagoon’s circulatory system in 1901. Lots of arteries and veins and capillaries kept the lagoon biome thriving.

In 1932. Notice the large natural channel at the bottom of the picture — the inlet at Malamocco. Here it is the shape of an oxbow. Works fine for the lagoon, but wasn’t at all suitable for commercial traffic.

The oxbow was furloughed when the Canale dei Petroli was dug in 1964-68. The channel shoots straight from the inlet on the right to the shoreline, and was dug along the shoreline in order to allow the tankers and other big merchant ships to reach Porto Marghera in the upper left-hand corner. After only two years, the effect was evident. Today, in view of the cruise ships arriving, dredging the channel has already begun, and will continue for 12 months. A deeper channel means the tide will be faster than before. All the little canals that used to be there helped to slow the tide down, but as you see, the tide won.

On the left you can see the tide patterns before the Austrian domination (1814), while on the right the tide patterns in 2009. So by all means make all the big ships traverse the lagoon from Malamocco for however many years it will take for the offshore port to be built. I’d just avoid presenting myself as a defender of the lagoon at the same time.

FREE MARCO ZENNARO:

Marco Zennaro (veneziatoday.it)

The 46-year-old Venetian businessman, well-known and loved by many, has been in prison in Sudan for three months. He is the owner of a company that produces electric transformers that has been doing business in Sudan for years. He has been accused by a Sudanese company of fraud, but the situation is an utter tangle of claims and characters. However, the photograph of the cell in which he was kept for two months with 30 other men, at temperatures of 114 degrees F., was all too comprehensible. Yes, the Italian government has attempted to intervene; yes, money has been paid, but turns out someone wants still more.

Now he is on house arrest in a Sudanese hotel, awaiting the next hearing (August 9) in the string of court appearances that may finally resolve the problem. He has already been absolved of two accusations, but it’s hard to know who wants what at this point. Of course money is at the core of this. Marco is well-known in the Venetian world of sport — Venetian rowing, for one thing, as well as rugby. As it happens, Lino has known him since he (Marco) was a boy. Also, Lino taught his mother how to row.

This one is written in English, no less.

“We Support Marco.” Petitions and initiatives continue. On June 13, some 15 Venetian rowers conducted a 24-hour event in which they took turns rowing from the Rialto to the Salute and back a la valesana (one person with two oars). They continued from noon June 13 to noon June 14 to raise awareness of this situation and urge its resolution. But here we still are.

“Let’s get Marco back.” This banner has been posted around much of Italy by now, by a far-right “association of social promotion” called CasaPound. (lagazzettatorinese.it)

MOSE:

Are we heading back to this again? Oh boy.

Mose worked last winter (except for one time), so you might think all is well? You would think wrong. I’m starting to dread the winter again.

The plan was to complete all the work by June 30, and declare the project finished on December 31, 2021. But that timetable is now in tatters for various reasons, primarily money problems (as always). The refusal of some suppliers to continue without payment also slowed things down, and the work was officially suspended yesterday, July 16, even though it actually had been stopped for three months already.

Without regular tests, without personnel from the companies involved, without some degree of ongoing maintenance, it’s not certain the gates will even rise when needed. Broken elements haven’t been replaced, parts are deteriorating because there is still no air conditioning in the underground gallery. There is severe corrosion that has been reported for years, to the frames of the underwater tensioners as well as the hinges of the gates. Encrustation of barnacles and other crud will certainly make the gates heavier. The gates at San Nicolo’ have been underwater for eight years now.

Bids have been solicited for a maintenance program budgeted at 64 million euros, even though some estimates maintain that at least 100 million euros will be needed for this every year. (Personal note: Lino has never batted an eye at the titanic construction costs. His refrain has always been simply “And the cost of the maintenance?”)

A Venetian deputy in Parliament, Orietta Vanin, has written to Enrico Giovannini, the Minister of Public Works, saying “A plan is missing for the launch of the work and the completion of the machinery. When is Mose going to be tested? What is the risk to the city in view of autumn? At what point are the interventions for the security of the Piazza San Marco? We’ve asked several times but have never had a response.”

TOURISM:

Not exactly a horde at 9:00 AM on a Saturday morning. I did see a group of about 15 people being guided around the Rialto Market.

The infamous hordes are not yet swarming the streets; tourists there are, many of them still day-trippers, but not insupportable numbers, by any means. We could probably use a good horde or two right now. Happily for everyone, American travelers are finally permitted to fly to Venice (I presume also to the rest of Italy). Delta Airlines has non-stop flights from Atlanta and New York, and the other day 200 passengers from the USA disembarked to great, if silent, applause. That’s just a drop, however, as the Venice airport is currently handling 15,000 “passages” a day, a mere third of their daily pre-pandemic total.

Still, no coherent plans for managing the eventual masses have yet been proposed. The secretary of the artisans’ association, Gianni De Cecchi, says “The pandemic has passed in vain.” So stand by for the usual complaints, protests, and laments to come forth again. Probably toward the end of next summer, if forecasts can be trusted. Stay tuned.

I like these tourists. Too bad there aren’t enough of them to keep Venice afloat.

I hang the sheets out to dry, he raises his sail. The life, she goes on.

Acqua Alta

MOSE makes history

October 3, 2020 26 Comments

I’m not going to lie: I never thought I’d see this day. Either it would never come, or by the time it did, I’d have long since turned into tera de bocal (clay for making chamberpots, as they put it here). But here we are, or more specifically, there it was this morning — the Adriatic to the right, the lagoon 70 cm lower to the left, and the vaunted MOSE floodgates ensuring for the first time that the twain shall never meet.

Years, decades, lifetimes have been devoted to constructing (and paying for) this thing, and I had little (in ErlaSpeak that means “no”) expectation that the gates would ever function. But they did. Allow me to doff my chapeau and say I’m not only astounded, but slightly weirded out. Because hearing three signals on the warning siren at 8:00 AM put all my nerves on high alert, even though we’re not in danger till four signals warn us of the possibility of the tide’s exceeding our personal domestic ground-level safe limit of 150 cm. Instead: Nothing.

I think everybody’s nerves have been a little tense, after two days of forecasts predicting an acqua alta to peak today at 135 cm above mean sea level at 12:05 PM. But at 9:00 AM (and at a mere 70 cm of rising tide) it was instead the long-discussed, -doubted, -reviled floodgates that rose, and stopped the sea at whatever the watery analogy of “in its tracks” may be. At the measuring station at the Diga Sud of the Lido the tide was at 119 cm, but the water at the Punta della Salute — bacino of San Marco, basically — was at 69 cm. When the tide turned, just after noon, it had reached 129 cm, but in the city was only a paltry 73.

This graph clearly shows the track of the tide, from its lowest point at 6:00 AM to the moment when the gates began to rise. Game, as they say, over.

We went outside to look at our canal. The water wasn’t moving. A lost pear, fallen from the fruit/vegetable boat upstream, was bobbing tranquilly in one place when it ought long since to have been carried off by the rising (or, by then, falling) tide.

Even on a normal day, the water in the canal is almost always moving at some speed, in some direction; only briefly, twice a month, does the tide pause in what is called the morte de aqua (“death of the water”). But here it was, stock still. It might as well have been in the bathtub. And so it remained until some time after the Adriatic began to withdraw; I suppose that didn’t need to be said, but perhaps someone other than myself might have forgotten that you wouldn’t lower the barrier until the sea was at least even with the level of water in the lagoon.

I didn’t used to think of 135 cm as anything more than “God, this is annoying.” But I think it’s fair to say that the doomsday inundation of November 11-12, 2019 is still too screamingly fresh in everybody’s mind to allow the casual return of “Sure, this is Venice, what do you expect?” Any tide above normal now appears potentially apocalyptic. And if our nerves were slightly on edge, so were those of the hopeful travelers who had booked hotel rooms and then, having heard early mentions of the dreaded words “acqua alta,” quickly canceled the reservations.

That’s too bad, because they missed a verifiably historic moment. And I’m glad I was here to see that pear not going anywhere in our canal.

The breakwater at San Nicolo’ on the Lido was an excellent spot for watching this epic event. This clip gives a sense of the force of the wind, always a crucial player on Team Flood Venice. This morning it was up to 41 kph (25 mph).

In case the still photograph above doesn’t convey the dynamic of what’s happening, this video from Corriere della Sera (particularly at the beginning and end of the clip) gives a glimpse of the force of the tide, as seen against the barriers as they rise, one by one. Fun fact: It took one hour and 17 minutes to raise all 78 of the gates, so the process obviously needs to start in a timely manner and not wait till the last OMG minute.

But this is astonishingly beautiful: Noon today in the Piazza San Marco, the moment of the peak tide which ought to have covered the pavement with some 45 cm/17 inches of lagoon. The only water that dampened the stones here came from the clouds.

Note: Two videos, and all of the images with the exception of the water in the Piazza San Marco, were forwarded to me by friends via WhatsApp, so I am unable to give appropriate credit to their sources.

Acqua Alta, MOSE

Anybody remember MOSE?

April 8, 2020 8 Comments

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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