What happens after a car accident? Roadways often need to be repaired. A “hardly visible” but necessary and huge activity. Palazzo Marino has released some numbers on the work of cleaning, reclaiming and restoring roads after accidents, carried out by the company “Sicurezza e Ambiente”, which also removes abandoned vehicles for the Municipality of Milan.
Often, after accidents, there are not only non-functioning cars or motorcycles that need to be moved, but debris, oil and other substances that have an environmental impact and are dangerous if left on the asphalt. “Efficiency – comments Marco Granelli, councilor for safety – is essential even in situations where the roadway is damaged, signs are destroyed, and dangerous potholes need to be guarded by officers”.
From 2022 to today, there have been more than 17 thousand roadway restoration interventions after an accident, and over 92 thousand kilos of residue removed from the roads. In 2022, post-accident cleaning and reclamation interventions were almost 30 thousand (29,512 to be exact), with 40 thousand kilos of debris collected (including damaged infrastructure), 20 thousand liters of dangerous substances sucked from the asphalt. In 2023, there were 5,189 interventions, with more than 42,600 kilos of solid waste and almost 17 thousand liters of sewage. In 2024, from January to today, 2,378 interventions have been recorded, 11,291 kilos of debris, 7,794 liters of sewage.
As regards the vehicle removal activity, this involved 864 vehicles in 2022, 742 in 2023, 194 up to 31 May 2024. The vehicles are more or less equally divided between motorcycles (and mopeds) and different vehicles (cars and truck).
The arrival of vehicles to restore the scene of an accident takes place on average in half an hour. Restoring the signs takes approximately 5 days. Infrastructure repairs (e.g. guardrails) are carried out in 15 days. The Municipality of Milan has given the OK to public interest for a public-private partnership proposal which will proceed with the concession of the road support service through tender, extending the activities to the restoration of road potholes, the repair of road signs not only in the event of an accident and the installation of sixteen crash attenuators equipped with cameras to identify the vehicles responsible for the damage.
