Even today there is an orange alert in the Milanese metropolitan area and in Lombardy, and the warning of Leonardo, the genius of Vinci who was also Architect and General Engineer in Milan governed by a powerful and visionary patron like Ludovico Maria, should resonate in the rooms of those who govern Sforza, known as il Moro: “If you need to deal with water, consult experience first and then reason”. We often have neither one nor the other.
And here we go again. For two days now Milan and the hinterland and part of Lombardy have been at the mercy of the Lambro and Seveso with flooding and damage, problems along the railway lines, closure of motorway toll booths between Brianza and Brescia. The Lambro, the first to flood, especially flooded Brianza with Gessate Bellinzago Lombardo under water, and the Milanese district of Ponte Lambro, with scenes of civil protection rescues with rubber dinghies, families evacuated, rescues by divers from the fire brigade, and Mayor Sala who recalled that even on the Lambro the lamination tanks are still missing.
In the afternoon it was the Seveso’s turn to flood into Milan and this is the 120th time since 1975! At 5.30pm, with the only Seveso lamination tank in the Parco Nord on the border with Bresso filled to the limit, Security Councilor Marco Granelli launched the alert. The river took over the Prato Centenaro area between Viale Suzzani and Via Mont, and the basin contained it for at least ten hours, avoiding a worse flood between Niguarda, Isola, Maggiolina and Pratocentenaro.
If the flood risk in Milan is dramatic, the reason is not the lack of funds or projects and technical capacity but of open construction sites to create that system of lamination tanks where the fury of the floods of a watercourse can be discharged it does not wait for the interminable times of regulation and control works. El Seves fiùmm de Milan floods from below because it is forced to flow tubed under the city for about 10 km in sections insufficient for its flood flow rates, estimated at the time to be very low.
The painful truth is that to date, only the pool in the Northern Park of Milan on the border with Bresso has been built, with work starting on 20 July 2020. The others, which must contain it along the plain north of Milan, are showing delays chronic. One of the two tanks in Senago will be ready in a few months, that of Lentate perhaps in a year, like those in the floodplain areas of Cantù, and for the Paderno-Varedo tank there is only the project and the contract has not yet been awarded .
An average delay of over 4 years on the timetable of the works countersigned by the then “italiasicura” Mission Structure of Palazzo Chigi in 2016 with the Region and Municipality of Milan, despite funds allocated since then, and the certainty that only a system of lamination tanks it can reduce or in some cases bring to zero the risk of flooding.
But anyway, the delay in the works today signals one of the national cases of self-harm in the most industrialized region, perfectly capable of carrying out any infrastructural work. But the security of the Seveso is entangled in open and unmanaged conflicts between Milan and the hinterland municipalities, between the municipalities along the river and the Region, between a local Nimby committee and all the institutions.
At the mercy of endless disputes, almost always incomprehensible given the many changes to the initial projects, the agreed ancillary works and the variations that have improved the interventions starting from the environmental additions. Appeals to the Superior Court of Public Waters are still pending and ended up in the Supreme Court for verification of legitimacy. In this absurd stalemate with clashes of stamped papers, everyone emerges defeated, given the object of the dispute which is not a destructive overbuilding of the territory but the creation of artificial lakes for the protection of citizens and public and private assets, where floods can vent of a river considered and used as an open sewer, diverted, choked and intubated.
In fact, the Fiùmm de Milan flows for 52 km in the provinces of Como, Monza and Brianza and Milan. Until the first half of the twentieth century, it crossed countryside areas, starting from its sources on Monte Sasso, in Cavallasca, at an altitude of 490 metres, less than 5 km as the crow flies from Como.
From there it passes through suggestive scenery, and nothing led us to imagine its subsequent function as a collector of industrial and civil sewers, and then its disappearance for about ten kilometers under Via Ornato in Milan, stuck in a tunnel completely insufficient to allow it to pass in case full. And its new “mouth”, at the confluence of the Martesana in the Naviglio, is also unnatural and tubed under the road surface of via Melchiorre Gioia.
The Seveso also has good reasons for being “injured of naturalness” given that in the 1980s, after a campaign of biochemical analyzes in the Region, it was declared a “dead river”. Since then, the ecological status reported by ARPA certifies it as barely sufficient up to Vertemate, poor up to Lentate, bad after Lentate and below Milan.
They divert it from the times of the Romans who, with one of their colossal undertakings, brought part of the river that flowed along the eastern perimeter of the Mediolanum castrum, towards the Nirone stream which passed a little further west to form the first defensive ring of water. They gave the name of Piccolo Sevese to the artificial western stretch of the Nirone, and to the remaining part of the ring that of Grande Sevese. Those two branches converged in the Vetra Canal, and are the oldest canals in Milan. Today it crosses urban and industrial areas that are increasingly narrow and shaped, with stretches between houses and factories that surround it to the point that the riverbed often coincides with the walls.
The paving in Milan began with the expansion of the late nineteenth century, and continued from 1930 and, after the General Town Plan of 1953, it extended to Niguarda and along via Ornato up to the municipal border with Bresso, with its new mouth . If in the event of a flood it once wandered across the countryside, today it can arrive enlarged from Brianza and easily flow out into the northern area, in Niguarda, Ca’ Granda, Comasina, Viale Sarca, Viale Zara and the new district of the Island, the Venice of the Milanese . Over the last 140 years, its waters have overflowed on average 2.6 times a year into Milan. And they were events, although sometimes contained, capable of paralyzing part of the metropolis, with the increase of its flows due to the confluence of the sewage drains of Paderno Dugnano, Cusano Milanino, Cormano, Bresso and Cinisello Balsamo. So, under the storms it now becomes a “draining basin”.
2014 was an annus horribilis, with 9 floods in a row, and the last one in July alone left 50 million euros in damage. In the year of the Universal Expo, the river had been awaiting the start of the “Seveso Project” works for about forty years, painfully blocked by institutional vetoes, local protests and a lack of funds.
It was based on the containment of flood waters in areas of drainage upstream of the cities, supported by Milan and the Region, but contested by the other hinterland municipalities such as Senago which displayed the “No Tanks” banner on the town hall, and by citizens’ committees against the expansion tanks that would be filled with its fetid water. The absence of sewerage systems and purifiers along the river also fueled the Nimby comitism of the “No”.
The Seveso Project was then estimated at 3 years of work and 145 million of investment, less than the total damage caused by the floods of the whole of 2014. When Italiasicura began to deal with it from Palazzo Chigi, the project was not only not financed but was not even included among the 1,700 million allocated for the works planned for the Universal Expo, the great Italian success from 1 May to 31 October 2015.
Those funds, however, came from the Government’s mission unit, with another 20 million from the Municipality of Milan committed by the then mayor Giuliano Pisapia and his deputy Ada Lucia De Cesaris who, with determination, also unblocked the plan to build the purifiers. And with the then regional councilor Viviana Beccalossi and her manager Dario Fossati, those resources began to become executive projects that the Region entrusted to the Interregional Authority of the Po.
It was, and is, about creating an integrated lamination system along the Seveso river, with maintenance of the riverbed and finally sewerage networks and purifiers. It was based on the creation of 4 water collection tanks between Lentate sul Seveso, Senago, Paderno-Varedo and Milan, capable of holding back over 4 million cubic meters of flood water, accompanied by renaturalisation by recreating floodplains between Vertemate, Cantù, Carimate and Lentate.
At the time, a dialogue was also opened with those who contested the works, accepting their requests to have the works preceded by purification sites in various municipalities, with an additional investment of 90 million euros. In one year, the shame of untreated waste water was eliminated, the main reason for the non-acceptance of the hydraulic defense system which provided for significant accumulations of flood waters.
At that point, the Seveso Project even became an integrated model that could be exported elsewhere since it addressed both overcoming hydraulic and pollution risks. Design and checks therefore began for the lamination tanks between Milano Parco Nord, Senago, Lentate, Varedo and Vertemate, Cantù, Minoprio and Carimate, for the strengthening of the north-west spillway and the restoration of the functionality of the river undercrossing in the subsoil of Milan, with the extraordinary maintenance of the Redefossi cable. Works for the environmental redevelopment of the banks were also included in the plan through the “River Contract”. With Italiasicura closed, the works went very slowly, amidst redesigns, controversies and conflicts between institutions that frankly are embarrassing.
It doesn’t happen only in Milan and Lombardy because institutional sloppiness and indifference, the removal of significantly increased risks in this climatic phase and comitism of the Nos even on the most useful and vital works are rampant in a country where the political cohesion capable of restarting a structure is lacking. centralized technique that can restart the largest public work that Italy needs.
