"Si seppellisce uno zio e poi si va a lavorare"

Gli americani, sul Wall Street Journal, spiegano la via italiana al protezionismo europeo con l'esempio di Taranto...
In pratica il modo anglosassone di dire qualcosa senza dire nulla. Cronaca acritica alla maniera del "così vanno le cose in Italia", buttandoci dentro un po' di dati e un po' di dichiarazioni ben bilanciate.
Poi la chiusura del pezzo ricalca il professionismo distaccato della giornalista: contenta di aver archiviato il suo lavoretto e pronta ad una nuova avventura, chiude "il pezzo" senza una visione.
Come nella celebre gag di Peppino de Filippo... "Ho detto tutto!"

 

A Chokehold Choice in Italy's South
In Time of Austerity, Steel Plant Blamed for Hundreds of Deaths Is Allowed to Stay Open; Burying an Uncle, Then Going Back to Work

By STACY MEICHTRY - Associated Press

     Vincenzo Vestita suspects furnaces of Ilva SpA's steel factory in the southern town of Taranto gave his uncle lung cancer. Yet, shortly after he buried his uncle last month, Mr. Vestita went back to his own job at the same plant.
    "I'm obviously leaving myself exposed," says Mr. Vestita, 35 years old, who maintains machinery at the plant, which belches fumes deemed so dangerous that livestock has been banned from grazing within 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, of it. Unless the plant gets cleaned up, "everyone will have to make a choice" between jobs and health, he says.
     Ilva says the plant is compliant with Italian and European Union rules on air pollution. Still, with the plant producing about a third of Italy's steel supply, the dilemma Mr. Vestita describes looms large over Italy's impoverished southern Mezzogiorno region, the government of Mario Monti and the wider economy of the euro zone's third-largest country.
    For months, officials in Rome and prosecutors in Taranto have been tussling over whether Ilva is safe enough to stay open. A Taranto court last month ordered the plant sealed, after medical experts commissioned by the court said the plant's fumes had caused 386 deaths from 1998 to 2010.
    But the government last week reversed the court order, allowing the plant to keep operating while it executes a €3 billion ($3.9 billion) safety revamp.
    The government's decree has drawn a wave of local criticism. "Come down here and visit our children who have been ravaged by cancer," Tonia Marsella of the Women for Taranto, a local advocacy group, said in an open letter to Italy's President Giorgio Napolitano.
    Workers rally in Taranto on Nov. 27 after a court ordered the plant closed. The order has been reversed to keep the plant open. Yet the state intervention is also a measure of the determination of the government—like many of its counterparts in Europe—to protect existing economic activity at a time when budget-squeezing austerity measures are choking growth. Closing the plant would leave not just its 12,000 workers out of a job, but also through ripple effects dry up half-a-percent of Italian GDP and threaten to kill the country's chances at economic revival.
    Environment Minister Corrado Clini summed up the dilemma faced by the government: "The economic impact of closing this plant would not only be costly; it would impoverish national industry."
    The Taranto plant is one of the many Italian formerly-state-owned companies that have become mired in controversy after being sold by the state. The factory was opened by the state during Italy's postwar boom with the aim of creating thousands of jobs and narrowing the economic gap between the country's rich industrialized north and its poorer agriculture-based south.

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 The move reshaped the sleepy fishing port, punctuating its skyline with smokestacks and plumes of smoke. By 1964, the plant was pumping out three million metric tons of steel a year. Tamburi, a small neighborhood built to house workers adjacent to the factory, mushroomed in population, growing to 23,000 people from 6,000 in the past two decades.

Yet critics say the health hazards also piled up. The smokestacks canopied Taranto's air with carcinogenic particles. Tamburi and other neighborhoods became coated with red powder blowing from a mineral deposit at the edge of the plant. After the 1995 privatization, Ilva's new owners cleaned the plant of widespread asbestos contamination; it then paid to send thousands of Ilva workers—including Mr. Vestita's father and uncle—into early retirement to comply with an Italian law that allowed workers exposed to asbestos to retire early.

Mr. Vestita's uncle had worked in the so-called "hot area" of the plant, where giant furnaces and casts transform hazardous materials into steel, while his father worked in the so-called "cold area," further away from the plant's ovens.

The move created thousands of job openings for new blood like Mr. Vestita, who signed up even though he knew there might be hazards. "It was clear this wasn't like working in an office," he said, but public awareness of the acute health hazards was limited.

 In June 2011, a team of epidemiologists commissioned by a Taranto judge began poring over the health records of 320,000 people in the Taranto area to measure the impact of plant fumes from 1998 to 2010. The researchers found that Ilva's workers were dying of cancer at much higher rates than the rest of the port's population. It also found that 638 children were hospitalized from 1998 to 2010 due to respiratory diseases that were attributed to plant fumes, and 17 children developed malignant tumors.

 The researchers compared the mortality and disease rates in Taranto with the expected rates of populations in areas with air-quality standards adopted by the World Health Organization as well as areas near Taranto not affected by the plant's fumes.

A spokesman for Ilva dismissed the findings of the study as unreliable "estimates" based on criteria that are more stringent than those mandated by Italy and the EU. The company is working with the government to implement the €3 billion overhaul, which aims to change the plant's filtration systems and furnaces in order to lower the plant's emissions.

 In March, the researchers submitted the study to a Taranto judge who months later ordered the arrest of Emilio Riva, one of Italy's richest men, on suspicion of conspiring with politicians to play down pollution levels, endangering the environment and public health. Last month, prosecutors sealed off the Ilva plant's shipping dock.

Mr. Riva, who has been under house arrest since July, hasn't publicly commented on the investigation, according to a spokesman for his family holding company, Riva Group, who also declined to comment. An arrest warrant has also been issued for Mr. Riva's son, Fabio. Efforts to reach him were unsuccessful. Neither man has been charged.

The moves against the Rivas set off alarm bells in Rome. Mr. Monti was fighting to wrest Italy from the jaws of the euro-zone debt crisis. The last thing his government needed was a full-blown industrial crisis affecting companies ranging from auto maker Fiat SpA F.MI+0.84% to producers of specialized machine parts.

As part of its decree to keep the plant open, the government has also promised €336 million in state subsidies toward the €3 billion overhaul.

Mr. Vestita doubts he could find other work in the region, where the jobless rate is 13.8%. But he hopes he won't have to keep worrying about the effects of staying at the plant. "There's a will to fight to make this place cleaner," he says.

Write to Stacy Meichtry at stacy.meichtry@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared December 8, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Chokehold Choice in Italy's South.