Above the Morandi Bridge, which collapsed in 2018, below the San Giorgio Bridge in Genoa, completed in 2020. Image: dpa
The catastrophe that was avoidable happened five years ago. The ongoing process makes this more and more apparent. Have lessons been learned?
You could even see it from space. The “Ponte Morandi”, named after its creator, an Italian engineer, had moved nine to ten centimeters in a few months. Of course, by the time NASA was able to evaluate the satellite images using modern technology, it was already too late. The Genoa motorway bridge, an important artery for the entire region, collapsed at 11:36 am on August 14, 2018, killing 43 people.
The disaster marks its fifth anniversary on Monday. It is still an open wound in the collective memory of Italians, because the collapse could have been avoided. The disaster is far from over, because the court proceedings on the question of guilt only began last year. “We anticipate a duration of around ten years across all instances. The first instance could come to an end at the end of next year,” says the chair of the bereaved organization, Egle Possetti, of the FAZ. She lost her sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew in the collapse.