Twenty-one years after the laying of the first stone, the MOSE is finished. Him too latest installations that had to be concluded – fire prevention and air conditioning – have been completed in recent days and now we are just waiting for the testing which will need to be done within the next year before delivery in 2026 to the State and therefore to the Lagoon Authority. The so-called «functional works” to the lift of the floodgates that defend Venice from high water: the Mose in the strict sense, the systems that were one of the most complex points. Then all the ancillary works are missing which however have nothing to do with the raising of the dams.
Three “button rooms”
In fact, they are also ready headquarters to manage it. Not one but three control rooms for the Mose at the Arsenale. The software for managing the mobile dams has been completed and we will see it in action with the first autumn high waters. There will be the operational decision-making room in which decisions on lifting are made based on weather data; the “mouth” one which is a clone of those created inside the MOSE caissons and is used to manage operations remotely in case problems arise on site; and then the “situation room”, the headquarters that no one would ever want to use but created so that there is a place with all the information in case of exceptional events which put other operational sections out of action. The system has also been completed conditioning essential for air recycling inside the boxes and the fire prevention system.
The first stone in 2003
The extraordinary commissioner Elizabeth Spitz Friday did a site inspection to the construction sites, having verified that all the missing systems have been completed: the news is that the Mose is technically finished 21 years after May 2003 the then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi laid the first stone. The statement is dry: «During the inspection of the construction sites, the completion of all the systems and the progress of the work underway to arrange the external spaces and remove the construction sites”. Things had taken a long time because the floodgates went up so many times between autumn and winter that companies had to be given more time to complete the systems. It will then be up to the Superintendency to carry out the administrative requirements for the closure of the construction sites.
A year of testing
The roadmap now includes a new phase testing, this time for the entire system. Since the gates have been in operation, engineers from the testing commission have participated and assisted in the operations to verify functionality and now that all the systems are operational it will be completed within a matter of one year. The next scheduled lift will be at July and will add other pages to the mighty volume of the harvest data collected from the first rise to the variables of the partial closures of the port inlets experienced over time. The end of the testing is scheduled for the last months of 2025, then the Mose will be delivered to the State at the beginning of 2026.
The concrete platform could become a beach
It will then pass to the Lagoon Authority chaired by Roberto Rossetto who has a year and a half to write the statute, select and hire a team of approximately 100 people and think about how to handle open situations. First of all, the maintenance of the floodgates to be done every five years but at the moment only three of the 78 have been raised from the bottom of the lagoon; then the reconversion of the «piarda», the platform of concrete created to make the caissons and which would have to be dismantled at the cost of one forties Of millions but there is an alternative plan to make some kind of it beach by the star landscape architect Joao Nunes.
Meanwhile, on the first one conch Of navigation in Chioggia, blank tests are being carried out to finalize the procedure for the passage of fishing boats from next autumn; the second basin will be completed at the end of summer.
