There are five cruise ships and fifteen container ships over 65 meters in height that have transited at least once in the Strait of Messina in 2023 and which, once the new bridge over the Strait is built, may have difficulty navigating this stretch of sea due to the known height limitations that the infrastructure will impose.
The Ministry of Transport revealed the numbers, recalling data transmitted by the General Command of the Port Authority Corps, in response to the civic access produced by the Circolo Pd of Villa San Giovanni which had taken action to understand which market share risks remain excluded in the future from transit between the two shores of the Strait of Messina. A topic raised several times in the past by Luigi Merlo, president of Federlogistica and responsible for institutional relations in Italy of MSC, a Geneva shipping and logistics group which more than any other risks being penalized because every week it receives large container ships at the Medcenter Container Terminal in Gioia Tauro and then because it also operates large latest generation cruise ships.
In addition to the Strait Society, which had already defended the work and its height in the past by explaining that the navigable freeway in the central part of the bridge will reach 72 metres, the words of Admiral Nunzio Martello, Coordinator of the Technical Table, must now also be recorded for the safety of navigation in the Strait of Messina for the construction of the bridge, who in this regard explained: “The issue of the navigable free space of the bridge over the Strait of Messina has been extensively analyzed through an in-depth examination of the traffic in recent years in the Strait, divided for the different boats. No ship transiting in 2023 would have been unable to pass through the bridge.” The representative of the maritime authority therefore seems to have made a firm point on the fact that the new bridge would have practically no impact on the maritime traffic that currently crosses the Strait.
A position that goes hand in hand with the denial that came already a month ago from the CEO. of the Strait of Messina company, Pietro Ciucci, who explained how the navigable freeway will be “72 meters for a width of 600 meters and is reduced to 65 meters only in the presence of exceptional conditions of heavy road and rail traffic. These parameters – he added in his explanation renewed in recent days – are in line with the existing bridges on the major international shipping routes, in coherence with the procedures established by the rules of the International Maritime Organization”. Ciucci had also pointed out that almost all of the ‘ultra large’ container ships sail the Mediterranean after having crossed the Suez Canal and, therefore, after passing under the Al Salam Bridge whose navigable clearance “is less than 72 metres” which will be available in Messina.
According to Merlo, however, “considering the average height of large cruise ships but also ships engaged in the transport of goods and containers”, the future bridge over the Strait “would prevent the transit of many naval units that already operate in the Mediterranean today, theoretically forced, once the bridge was built, to circumnavigate the whole of Sicily even just to reach Messina or Catania starting from Naples”. As mentioned, one of the ports most penalized by this limitation would be the Gioia Tauro hub where MSC regularly hosts its latest generation 24,000 TEU container ships which, if the bridge had a maximum height of 65 metres, would have to lengthen their route and circumnavigate Sicily with an increase in navigation times and costs.
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