The Strait of Messina company, appointed by the Meloni government to manage the bridge project over the Strait of Messina, sent a PDF full of incomprehensible tables and outdated data to the Ministry of the Environment. The documentation should have been used for the necessary environmental impact assessment of the work, strongly supported by the Minister of Transport, Matteo Salvini, but the same ministry led by colleague Gilberto Pichetto Fratin defined the data as “materially not readable” and for this reason he asked the company to do it all over again, asking for around 280 clarifications.
One of the tables presented to the Ministry of the Environment by the Stretto di Messina companyMinistry of the Environment
Seeing is believing
As can be seen simply by downloading the traffic study, sent by the Stretto di Messina company to the Ministry of the Environment, after a few pages tables begin to appear full of haphazardly placed and completely illegible characters. And it’s not just the data that is incomprehensible, the very wording in the tables cannot be deciphered.
Most likely, whoever exported the study on the traffic performance of the bridge over the Strait of Messina to send it to the Ministry of the Environment he forgot to check that the conversion of the files to PDF format was successful. In fact, the chaos of letters, symbols and numbers appeared before the eyes of the ministry technicians appears to be an error in the character encodingthat is, the system that allows computers to recognize and reproduce letters, symbols and numbers on the screen.
The other problems
However, the problems in the documentation sent by the Stretto di Messina company are not limited to export errors. According to the Ministry of the Environment, the little data that remained readable in the long PDF of approximately 318 pages would also be out of date and limited. For this reason the ministry had to ask for explanations regarding the compatibility of the project with the updates of the environmental constraints and landscape, aanalysis of the costs and benefits of the worka summary of all the planned interventions, an updated and congruent picture of the conditions of tsunami hazard and the updating of air quality estimates during the construction and operational phases.
In summary: the Ministry of the Environment essentially told the company to do it all over again. And to say that the Strait of Messina company has been responsible for the construction of the bridge over the Strait for 43 years and should theoretically be the most competent organization on the topic. However, as we read seven times in the Resolution of 29 October 2018 number 23/2018/G of the Court of Auditors, relating to the liquidation practices of the company started in 2013 and then removed by the Meloni government, the company has been characterized for years by “absence of relevant activities”during which however he continued to receive public funds.
