Liguria. A little more than a year after the “laying of the first stone”, celebrated with great fanfare by the whole city complete with flying boxes and giant screens positioned in the city, today is the day of the laying of the first “brick” of that great submerged wall that will be the new Genoa dam: the first caisson of the new forane, in fact, this afternoon will be sunk and positioned on the seabed in front of Sampierdarena, in the presence of representatives of local and national institutions.
A ceremony that was supposed to be one of the most celebrated events of the year – given that this is the largest work financed at least in part by the Pnrr – but which in fact will take place in the shadow of the major investigation by the Genoese judiciary which involved high institutional profile figures such as the president of the Liguria Region Giovanni Toti and the former president of the Genoa Port System Authority Paolo Emilio Signorini, today respectively under house arrest and in prison.
Dam Day will begin at at 3.30pm with institutional greetings from the extraordinary commissioner of the Authority Paolo Piacenza (ended up in the investigation papers and now under investigation for abuse of office), of the mayor and extraordinary commissioner for the new dam Marco Bucci, of the president ad interim of the Liguria Region Alessandro Piana and the deputy minister Edoardo Rixi. Then he speaks Pietro SaliniCEO of WeBuild and leader of the consortium For Genoa Breakwater. At 4.15pm connection streaming from the construction site into the sea for the sinking phase of the caisson, therefore the intervention of Claudio Gemme of Fincantieri Infrastructure, president of the consortium, and of the managing director Silvio Fascio. Conclusions entrusted, as mentioned, to the deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini.
From a technical point of view it will involve lowering a parallelepiped with a trapezoidal base 22 meters high with two bases of 40 meters and 25 meters wide, which will be placed at a depth of 20 meters. The underlying ground was consolidated by 280 6 meter long gravel columns. The caissons, 93 in total, are prefabricated in the special plant on the Vado Ligure dam and transported by sea. They are composed of an iron and concrete framework and are the main component of the new dam, because the wave wall will be built above them, which will protect the port basin from storm surges. The transport from the Savona port to Genoa took about twenty hours of navigation along the coast.
The work has a total value of 1.3 billion euros and is financed for 1.223 billion with state funds including the National Plan for Complementary Investments, Infrastructure Fund and Law 56 of 2024. The difference, equal to 77 million euros, is covered with the recently approved regional law which authorizes the Liguria Region to take out a 57 million loan and 20 million paid by the Port System Authority of the Western Ligurian Sea. But the president of the Anac himself, Giuseppe Busia, in recent weeks he has raised the alarm about possible surge in costs linked to compensation that should be paid to the Eteria consortium after the TAR ruling which declared the assignment to PerGenova illegitimate.
Anac, in a resolution, had contested the assignment of the works without competition to the consortium For Genoa Breakwater led by WeBuild without competition, but also the too many variations presented e the inclusion of the project in plan extraordinary after the collapse of the Morandi bridge and therefore in derogation of the laws and the risk of serious conflicts of interest. Observations that they do not automatically produce a stop (and which, indeed, Palazzo San Giorgio has announced that it intends to challenge), but which expose the work to the risk of judicial investigations: the dossier it would in fact be under scrutiny by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.
