2024-08-05 20:35:39
The owner of a bar in the southern Italian city of Tamburi, Ignazio D’Andria, remembers how his children played in the morning with the black dust that had appeared on their pillows overnight. Five years later, black mucus started coming out of her nose, and the youngest daughter died within a month. “She got poisoned. We’ve been breathing poison here for years,” he claims, pointing in the direction of a nearby business that has been releasing toxic fumes into the area since 1965.
From our special correspondent – The Acciaierie d’Italia steelworks, better known by its former name of Ilva, is the largest plant of its type in Europe and one of the largest in the world. It employs approximately eleven thousand people and accounts for 75 percent of the gross domestic product of the province of Taranto in the poor south of Italy.
Upon arrival in the city, there is an unpleasant smell in the air and a fine red dust covers everything. “It’s safer to wear a respirator around here, see the smoke?” asks Ignazio D’Andria. The steel mill is about two kilometers away. “I’ve lived here for twenty years, he won’t save me anymore, but he could save you,” he adds.
Emissions from the red-and-white-striped chimneys that tower over the city have become a normal part of life for many of the locals. “Every day I have to clean the dust. The last time I did it was two hours ago,” describes D’Andria as he wipes the window frames of his bar with a damp cloth.
It is this fine dust that is the most dangerous. They accumulate on car wipers, in window grooves or between paving stones. It comes from reserves of iron ore and coking coal that cover an area the size of ninety football fields in the city.
Excessive incidence of cancer
In the shantytowns in the shadow of the steel plant, residents are forbidden by law to touch the soil, and in the twenty-kilometer closed zone around the factory, farmers cannot cultivate it. Dust and soot also make local waters unsuitable for mussel farming and, according to experts, are responsible for the above-average incidence of cancer among locals.
People from Taranto have some forms of cancer 70 percent more often than the regional average. Respiratory, kidney and cardiovascular diseases are also rampant in the area. Children are more often born with disabilities, reports the British station BBC.
Doctors confirm that the incidence of cancer fluctuates depending on the output of the local steel mill, suggesting a link between the operation of the plant and the health of the residents. “Our children suffer the most and there’s nothing we can do about it,” says Teressa Mattela, an Italian police officer guarding the gates of a cemetery located in the immediate vicinity of the factory.
When a southerly wind blows into town, schools have to close. Sometimes up to five days a month. In 2010, the local council issued a regulation banning children from playing outside due to soil contamination. The local medical college has publicly recommended that children shower every time they come in from outside.
A 2019 study by the Italian ISS Institute found that in the seven years to 2012, Taranto’s childhood lymphoma rate was double the regional average. The World Health Organization (WHO) also reached similar results.
“Emissions from the Ilva plant cause unnecessary deaths and adverse health effects. For example, for men and women over 30 years old living in the municipality of Taranto, up to 27 deaths per year are estimated in the least favorable scenario, while in the most favorable scenario, i.e. when the air quality is over a year better, this number drops to five deaths,” writes the WHO.
Court battles
Donato Vaccaro worked in a steel mill in Taranto for thirty years. “We were grinding like animals,” he describes to the British newspaper The Guardian, showing a photo of a colleague covered in soot. He blames himself for the death of his son. He and his wife would like to move out, but their home has dropped in value and is now nearly impossible to sell.
In addition, the factory faces many legal disputes. Mauro Zaratta and his wife Roberta sued for negligent homicide after their son Lorenzo died of a brain tumor at the age of five. During the autopsy, doctors found iron, steel, zinc, silicon and aluminum in his brain. The judges are now investigating whether it was these pollutants that caused the boy’s cancer.
At the end of June, the Court of Justice of the European Union stated that the Italian government should close the steel plant if it poses significant risks to the environment and the health of the population. However, according to the tribunal, such a verdict belongs to the district court in Milan, whose decision he requested.