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Latest Bridge Collapse Shows Italy Can’t Get a Grip on Roads

Latest Bridge Collapse Shows Italy Can’t Get a Grip on Its Roads

(Bloomberg) -- The collapse of a highway viaduct in northwestern Italy has underscored the country’s failure to come to grips with the aging infrastructure spanning some of its most fragile regions.

A day after a landslide ripped away part of the viaduct on the A6 highway between Savona and Turin, in the Liguria region, the government rushed to make new pledges on safety.

“We must do all we can to give Liguria a special plan for infrastructure security,” Infrastructure Minister Paola De Micheli of the center-left Democratic Party said in comments cited by Ansa news agency.

But similar promises have been made before. Pledges by the previous government, led like the current one by Premier Giuseppe Conte, to form a new agency to monitor bridges and tunnels after the fatal 2018 collapse of the Morandi span in Genoa have made little progress.

Italy has also proven incapable of spending money where it’s needed. The country’s regions are using only a fifth of funds allocated for protection from hydro-geological risks, because of bureaucratic red tape, according to the national audit court.

Two viaducts on the A26 highway running north/south to Liguria were shut for safety checks requested by Genoa-based prosecutors based on information compiled as part of an investigation into the Morandi accident. Limited traffic will resume on the road at noon on Tuesday, road manager Autostrade per l’Italia said on its website.

Bureaucratic Hurdles

The proposed new oversight agency, dubbed Ansfisa, is still far from seeing the light of day, according to two officials who asked not to be named discussing confidential matters.

Setting up new government bodies takes time and involves numerous bureaucratic hurdles, one of the officials said, adding that public and private operators should be forced to invest more, including on technologies like cheap risk-detection sensors.

Decades after the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s saw new highways and bridges crop up across the country, Italy is struggling to come to terms with a legacy of aging concrete, and with the specter of new disasters waiting to happen.

After the 2018 Genoa bridge collapse, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, the biggest partner in the ruling coalition, was quick to push to revoke concessions granted to operators who fail to maintain bridges and roads.

Ironclad Contracts

“These are ironclad contracts which were set up with the knowledge that sooner or later someone with good sense would get into those ministries asking, ‘what the hell have you done?’” Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio said.

Five Star and the Democrats have long had policy differences on concessions, with the latter favoring a review of contract conditions rather than revocation.

Societa Iniziative Autostradali e Servizi SpA, known as SIAS, manages the roadway where the bridge collapsed on Sunday. The Morandi bridge was on a stretch of highway managed by Autostrade, a division of the Benetton family’s Atlantia SpA.

In some cases, there is also confusion about local versus regional or even national jurisdiction.

“There are about 43,000 road bridges in Italy, and responsibility is so fragmented between public and private operators, regions, provinces and towns that for more than 1,600 of them, we don’t know who’s responsible,” said Oliviero Baccelli, professor of transportation politics and economics at Milan’s Bocconi University.

Compounding the challenge: roads and bridges built throughout often mountainous terrain, much of it in areas where steep hillsides are becoming more unstable in extreme weather.

Latest Bridge Collapse Shows Italy Can’t Get a Grip on Roads

“We need to monitor not just the infrastructure itself but also the surrounding area,” geologist Antonello Fiore, head of the Italian Society for Environmental Geology, said of the northern regions of Liguria and Piedmont. “You canhave the most stable viaduct from a structural point of view, but a landslide will rip it down all the same.”

--With assistance from Giovanni Salzano.

To contact the reporters on this story: John Follain in Rome at jfollain2@bloomberg.net;Marco Bertacche in Milan at mbertacche@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net, Jerrold Colten, Alessandro Speciale

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