Campaign For A Living Venice

The increasingly large and frequent acqua alta high tide events are above all the result of the enormous excavations of the port canals that have opened the way to a river of water that enters and exits at an impressive speed

This letter to the editor is shared with CFLV from Ytali Global.

We received and gladly publish the following letter:

Dear Editor,
The Port Authority has revoked the restriction that limited the mooring of ships over 210 meters in length at the Fusina 4 berth when a unit was already moored at Fusina 3. Thanks to this, more ships will be able to dock at the Fusina cruise terminal starting in the next cruise season. From the current limit of 74, it will be possible to reach over 100 dockings in a single season.

This – states the Harbour Master’s Office – is the result of a long process of analysis and collaboration with the Port System Authority of the Northern Adriatic Sea (Adspmas) and the technical-nautical services of pilotage, towing and mooring; it was also made possible thanks to the recent excavation interventions of the seabed and the new bathymetric surveys which have guaranteed greater safety for the manoeuvres of ships entering and exiting the Darsena Sud of Fusina.

In fact, the Harbour Office notes that the excavations have removed the existing safety limits. However, and this does not depend on the Harbour Office, we forget that those excavations were carried out in a lagoon area where the average depth should be eighty centimetres. The increasingly large and frequent acqua alta high tide events are certainly the result of the rising sea levels, as well as land subsidence, accentuated by the pumping of water to serve the factories of Marghera from the aquifers present under Venice. However, above all, they are the result of the enormous excavations of the port canals that have opened the way to a river of water that enters and exits at an impressive speed. The flow of the tide, aided by the frightening displacement caused by the passage of ships, has removed a quantity of millions and millions of cubic meters of sediments, all replaced by water, so much water. There are bathymetric areas near the Pilots’ Tower at the mouth of Malamocco with depths greater than twenty-five meters, when the Adriatic in front of the coast is only twelve meters.

Today, the lagoon watershed that balanced the tide of the two mouths no longer exists, especially towards the shoreline, and the water enters without any obstacle in only one direction. The sandbanks and the small canals (the so-called ghebi), which made the water flow gradually have been eroded and have disappeared, and so very often the tide becomes a real flood without obstacles, except for MOSE, which was not designed to be a tidal regulator but as a safeguard only from exceptional tides, which today are the norm.

According to the president of the Port Authority, Fulvio Lino Di Blasio,

This intervention represents a fundamental step for the economic development of the port of Venice and is perfectly aligned with the concept of ‘production safety’ repeatedly underlined by the maritime director of the Veneto, Admiral Filippo Marini.

For us it means that they want to pursue naval gigantism without taking into consideration Venice and its lagoon, and that the excavation of the Vittorio Emanuele and Malamocco Petroli canals and their disproportionate expansion will be the next atrocities committed in the name of progress. For us, progress is such only if it is sustainable. Jobs, with the related speculation of multinationals and the port, cannot always be the excuse to do anything, especially in an area where the Marghera Petrochemical Plant was built in the name of jobs.

Those jobs no longer exist today, but the lagoon has been terribly polluted since that time, and many workers have also lost their lives. Yet there is not even the money to plant sheet piles to stop polluting discharges into the lagoon, let alone for remediation. No one is thinking about long-term interventions that over time could take the port out of the lagoon. If you consider that the docks of the largest port in Europe are thirty miles away from the docking of ships, we believe even more so that the three miles from the docking to the docks that would be needed in the case of the port of Venice are more sustainable.

Will we continue to pursue naval gigantism, allowing ships to enter where they normally would not enter? It seems that this is the route they want to take, until it can’t go any further because they can’t dig any further: then the ships will no longer pass, losing both competitiveness and the lagoon. We believe that a long-term program for an off-shore port, and permission to enter the lagoon only for ships of ten to eleven thousand tons like the Pinault classes is better. It would not only bring jobs, but also guarantee a higher quality of tourism and generate better jobs.

Best regards,

Alessandro Dissera Bragadin
Founding Member of Marevivo Veneto ODV
for Marevivo delegations of Lombardy, Piedmont, Varese and Veneto