LAGONEGRO – «A loud bang. Then the darkness.” “The scene we found when we arrived was that of a bomb that had just exploded.” These are the dramatic testimonies of a firefighter (off duty at the time) and the 118 doctor, given in yesterday’s hearing at the Lagonegro Court. Thus continues the trial for the death of the young Giovanna Pastoressa, 28 years old. Both, for different reasons, recounted the disaster that struck Lauria on 13 December 2019, when part of the roof of the Sports Hall came off and ended up on the gym where Giovanna Pastoressa was also training. There are 9 defendants, accused in various capacities of manslaughter and negligent bodily harm. There are those responsible for the procedure, the structural designer, the tester, the owner and sole director of the company awarded the contract for the work, the designer of the laminated wood structure that covered the building, the legal representative of the company that carried out the installation of the lamellar structure and the designer of the work.
There was also a firefighter in the gym that evening. On what was a “normal winter evening”, as he specified, the man, off duty, was training when, suddenly, everything collapsed. He was the first, together with the owner of the gym, to notice Giovanna and come to her aid. The young woman was on the floor, still on the treadmill, unconscious. Then 118 arrived. «It was all dark, the firefighters were making our way through the rubble – said Dr. Alessandra Palagano who had just started her shift when the call came – Dr. Pastoressa had a deep wound in the occipital region, the skull was completely crushed. We stabilized her and then transported her immediately to the emergency room in Lagonegro.” Giovanna’s parents, Domenico and Maria Cristina, were also in the courtroom, followed by the lawyers Raffaele Melfi and Antonio Donadio and accompanied by the Libera association. Furthermore, among others, the consultants of part of the Pastoressa family, the engineers Raffaele Landolgo and Mario D’Aniello, were also interviewed. Their report substantially confirms what has already been described by the prosecutor’s experts.
«From the analysis of the documentation filed and the structural checks conducted – we read in the summary presented in the classroom – it was ascertained that if the fork had been armed as per the project drawings, it would have been able to resist a wind speed more than double that of the project value and the roof would not have been lifted”. Which in simple words, means that, as built, that part of the roof of the building would not have resisted even the force of the wind which, according to the regulations, must be foreseen in the design phase.
