It was three years ago to this day. On August 14, 2018, the Morandi motorway bridge, located on a busy axis in Genoa because it facilitates trade between southern and northern Italy, collapsed, causing dozens of vehicles to fall.
In total, the drama had left 43 dead. To pay tribute to the victims, the context of the pandemic requires that the celebrations be in a reduced format while they are broadcast live on television.
Therefore, RAI, the Italian public television channel, will dedicate a large part of its airtime to this issue. It should be based in particular on the “telegiornale Liguria”, the television news from Liguria (the region where Genoa is located) which will be broadcast live from the “Parco della Memoria”.
Located under the old Morandi bridge – a new bridge has since been built – this “memory park” in French, was built to keep alive the memory of those who died of the tragedy.
The 24-hour news channels, for their part, should focus more on the legal aspect of the drama and, in particular, on the trial that will open next October.
In this case, up to seventy-one people signed up, together with the company Autostrade per l’Italia (ASPI), managing the bridge, and the engineering company Spea, both subsidiaries of the group. Atlantia, which controlled 30.25%. by Edizione, the Benetton family holding company.
Most of the respondents are executives or technicians currently employed by ASPI or by Spea. Among them were the then general director of Atlantia, Giovanni Castellucci, as well as the former head of Spea, Antonino Galata, and several officials from the Ministry of Infrastructure.
In addition to the tragedy having deeply shocked Italians, it had highlighted the poor condition of the peninsula’s roads, bridges and railways where infrastructure suffers from a chronic deficit of maintenance and investment.
In addition, the catastrophe had been such that it had had repercussions until the other side of the Alps. In June 2019, the mission française d’information sur la sécurité des ponts avait ainsi published a report on the 25,000 of 250,000 ponts de l’Hexagone seraient, selon elle, «en mauvais état structurel et posant des problèmes de sécurité et de disponibilité pour the users”.
At the time, the authority had demanded a “Marshall Plan” to renovate these structures within ten years, a project that the coronavirus crisis has also come to frustrate a bit.