The trial archives in L’Aquila, the digital copy in Belluno. Thus, with a Solomonic decision by the Ministry of Culture which ultimately dissatisfied the people of Belluno, the controversy over the archives of the Vajont disaster ended.
The 256 folders containing the trial documents were in L’Aquila because there, 550 kilometers away to avoid pressure on the judges, both the first degree and the appeal for the tragedy that on the evening of 9 October 1963 due to a landslide that fell from the slope of Monte Toc into the hydroelectric basin which went over the dam and caused almost two thousand deaths.
The ‘journeys’ of the folders
The documents were kept, until a drain pipe broke, in a basement of the L’Aquila court; then they were moved to the Government Palace, the historic seat of the State Archives of the Abruzzo capital. In 2008 the trial file was handed over to the Archival Institute which carried out the inventory. However, on 6 April 2009 the Abruzzo capital was shaken and devastated by an earthquake; the facade of the Government Palace reduced to rubble, the architrave broken in half, but the metal cabinets that stored the Vajont documents resisted the collapse. The folders were temporarily transferred to a shed but the following year the documents went to the State Archives of Belluno to continue the document inventory and digitization project. The custody continued thanks to a series of extensions and despite the expiration of the agreement until L’Aquila began to reclaim his documents. And, at the same time, Belluno wants to preserve them.
The disputed Vajont folders
Now the department of Via del Collegio Romano, responding to the question presented by the deputies of the Democratic Party Rachele Scarpa And Piero Fassino in which it was requested to make the transfer of the procedural archive fund of the Vajont disaster to the headquarters of the Belluno Archive definitive, established that, once the digitization is finished, the procedural archives will return to L’Aquila, while a digital copy will remain in Belluno .
A completely unsatisfactory response for the Democratic Party: «The ministry’s response is a senseless closure – comments Scarpa – As underlined by the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella last year at the ceremony for the sixtieth anniversary of the disaster, the enormous value of those documents for the local population makes it “appropriate, if not necessary” to keep the documents in Belluno, because they now have a memorial purpose. The Vajont disaster was a unique event in terms of severity and human responsibility in terms of environmental impact and the sacrifice of lives in the name of profit. The voices of that process deserve to be preserved close to the communities that still today retain its scars on the walls of their homes or in the stories of parents and grandparents.”
