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Five dead, one seriously injured transported intubated to the Palermo Polyclinic and one miraculously unharmed. This is the toll of a tragic accident at work that comes from Casteldaccia, a municipality in the Palermo area. Here six workers would have been trapped while carrying out work in the sewers and would have breathed toxic fumes from the sewage. The workers were working on the maintenance of the Amap wastewater lifting plant on the Casteldaccia seafront and not in a wine tank owned by Vini Corvo as the agencies initially wrote.
According to initial reconstructions, the workers would have remained stuck inside the plant in which they were working while another worker, having suffered his first illness, would have managed to get out and raise the alarm while his colleagues would have lost consciousness. The fire brigade teams arrived in Casteldaccia at 2pm to rescue the workers who had fallen ill inside the wastewater purification tank.
Six workers, of the seven involved, who were engaged in sewerage work in Casteldaccia are employees of the Quadrifoglio group srl company of Partinico (Palermo): this is a company that worked on behalf of the Palermo municipal company Amap which deals with water management in city and in some municipalities of the province. A seventh worker would be an Amap temporary worker.
«What I felt at the news of the death of the workers in Casteldaccia was a profound pain – is the comment of the president of the Sicilian Region, Renato Schifani -. On behalf of myself and the entire council I express my most sincere condolences to the families of the victims for the terrible and unexpected tragedy that has struck them.”
«It’s a huge tragedy. We are shocked. Five young people who died for a piece of bread. It’s inconceivable” says the mayor of Casteldaccia, Giovanni Di Giacinto.
