2023-06-28 19:00:43
The sea of Sicily is wonderful but sometimes even terrible. For example, the one made by the Palermitan journalist Fabio Lo Verso between Augusta and Syracuse, along the most polluted coast of the island, is an extraordinary investigative journey. The author tells us about it in the investigative book “The sea color poison” just released by Fazi publisher. On a short stretch of this coast to the east, the population has been living with the toxic substances of a gigantic petrochemical plant for half a century.
Lo Verso’s is a raw and painful reportage on Italy’s least known environmental disaster, but one of the oldest and most profound. The images, which leave no room for doubt, are by Alberto Campi, the preface of the volume is by Enrico Bellavia, another journalist from Palermo. Today they call it “the quadrilateral of death” but still after the war it was “the most beautiful place in Sicily”, according to the author of “The Leopard”, the writer Tomasi di Lampedusa. Here is the headquarters of the largest petrochemical pole in Italy, the second in Europe, a Moloch which produces 37% of the region’s GDP: three oil refining plants, two chemical plants, three power plants, a cement plant, two factories of industrial gas and dozens of associated companies.
“There are just thirty kilometers of land where factories, cisterns and chimneys spread like wildfire disfiguring the landscape, for 50 years now, spreading industrial poisons of all kinds – explains Lo Verso – Mercury, lead, hydrocarbons, arsenic, benzene, sulfur dioxide and dioxins which have contaminated the sea, the earth, the air and the groundwater, above all they have entered homes to claim victims, including those who have fallen at work, died from cancer and congenital malformations in newborns”.
A colossal tragedy consumed in 50 years has touched lives and the environment
This colossal and silent tragedy then takes on the hues of the absurd, when it collides with the immobilism and corruption of the institutions, with aborted reclamations and covered up investigations and with the so-called “employment blackmail”, which leads some to the desperate affirmation that it is ” better to die of cancer than starvation”.
“The poisonous color sea” is a lucid reportage from the four municipalities of the quadrilateral: from the city of Augusta to the village of Melilli, from that of Priolo Gargallo to the capital of Syracuse. In these places, where the industrial mirage “dissolved in a long health, economic and social agony”, Lo Verso collected the testimonies of activists, former workers, mayors, politicians, prosecutors, representatives of the scientific community and defenders of the industry , but also “of ordinary people, families affected by very serious losses, whose feelings oscillate between anger, fear and resignation”.
In short, an urgent and disruptive denunciation that sheds light on the background, the implications and the possible solutions of a dramatic story, of which “too little has been said guilty and which risks swallowing up, like a black hole, the future of a territory and its inhabitants”, recalls the author, who does not make concessions to anyone. “An acute investigation – comments Stefano Ciafani, national president of Legambiente – which sheds light on polluted Italy that rebels and does not want to be abandoned in the era of ecological transition”. We are all warned. After all, after the results of Ilva of Taranto, in nearby Puglia, no one can no longer be unaware. (Rossella Guadagnini)
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