Arzano. No cleanup after the release of the seizure by the Prosecutor's Office, the cemetery of buried waste still remains in its place.
A sad record and a tunnel, the one where the subway should have run to connect the city of arzano to nearby Piscinola, which has become an illicit storage site.
Thousands of tons of special waste of all kinds buried, piled up for a few kilometers are still there despite the investigations of the local police started in October 2019, the seizure of the site and the subsequent "reassignment" to the Campania Region and Metropolitan City in recent days in the presence of the Councilor for the Environment of the municipality of Arzano Maddalena Tramontano and the sector manager Gianfranco Marino.
The access descent to it is still littered with tires, inert materials, refrigerators, asbestos, neon, batteries, pieces of cars and motorcycles. A powder keg that if set on fire, could cause the entire vault of the tunnel to collapse and only God knows what damage it could cause to the thousands of vehicles in transit and to the elevated road that rests its pylons right on the underground tunnel.
Not to mention the pollution of the subsoil and any aquifers. The local police discovered it after the investigation by the newspaper “Il Roma”. The site in question, according to what was ascertained at the time by the investigators, would have been the crossroads of almost all the neighboring municipalities since the entrance is well connected through the ramps of the Asse mediano to the roundabout.
But what immediately caught the eye of the first people to arrive on site was the mass of waste present on the access slope several hundred meters long, and the meticulousness with which the criminals had stored the waste in such a way as to make it "invisible" to prying eyes.
Down the slope – in an open space also flooded with mountains of industrial and other waste – stands the large vault of the tunnel built about twenty years ago to connect, via the metro, the municipalities north of Naples (including Arzano) to nearby Piscinola.
Several dozen meters high, it still hides inside, in its belly, tons of waste including furniture, inert materials, dies, paints, thinners, tires, bituminous sheaths, asbestos and industrial waste of all types and origins.
An expanse of waste as far as the eye could see, so much so that in order to measure its extent and report it to the magistrate on duty, the local police had to call in speleologists from the Italian Red Cross of the Naples North Committee.
The tunnel works had been suspended after the collapse of the final part of the tunnel due to a gas leak that caused the death of 11 people including the five workers. In place of the so-called crossroads, a 40-meter wide hole was created. A mega project financed with post-earthquake funds.
The project had been awarded to a consortium of companies that had received the contract from a concessionaire, Cogeri of Milan, a contracting body thanks to the concession of the Interministerial Committee for Economic Programming (CIPE) of the region. The citizens' protests had already begun in 1996, with the construction of the tunnel in Arzano.
The collapse and explosion in 1996 caused 11 deaths
A few months later, a gas station collapsed. The excavations did not stop even when the floors of a building in the Rione Fiori began to crumble. Then it was the turn of the church on Via Limitone di Arzano, but the excavations did not stop even then.
On January 23, 1996, at 16.20:XNUMX p.m., there was a gas explosion that tore through the crossroads of Secondigliano, a neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Naples.
Five workers from the Scarl Arzano company died in the explosion: Michele Sparaco, Alfonso Scala, Mario De Girolamo, Giuseppe Petrellese and Gennaro De Luca. Among the victims, in addition to an 11-year-old girl, Serena De Santis, were Emilia Laudati, Francesco Russo, Pasquale Silvestro (brother of Forza Italia senator Francesco Silvestro), Ciro Vastarella and Stefania Bellone. Since then, the area, in the Secondigliano neighborhood of Naples, has been abandoned and no one knows who should clean it up.
PB
Article published on March 9, 2024 - 09pm
