2020 is not a particularly lucky year for the city of Milan and for its mayor Giuseppe Sala. Fresh from a triumphal 2019, with the tourism record and the assignment of the 2026 Winter Olympics together with Cortina, the Italian "moral capital" has been overwhelmed by Covid-19, which more than elsewhere has put its economy and certainties in crisis. In the middle there was also some "crab" taken by the mayor (think of the controversy over the unfortunate slogan "Milan doesn't stop", or the clashes with the Government and the other Regions, or even the grain of the new stadium of Inter and Milan) and then, yesterday, the latest episode: a water bomb that caused yet another flooding of the Seveso.
An age-old problem that Milan has been dragging on for some time and on which just yesterday, while the city was waking up under 70 centimeters of water (the amount that falls in a month), with the river level raised by over 3 meters (200 interventions of the firefighters), Sala providentially intervened: "After years of stalemate - wrote the mayor on his social profiles - this week the works for the Bresso tank started. A work that is confirmed, today more than ever, as fundamental to resolving the ten-year Seveso issue". However, the work as a whole will only be ready in 2023, and in any case the first containment tank, that of Senago, will not be completed before a year.
And to think that already in 2015, five years ago, the Lombard capital celebrated the allocation by the Renzi government of 122 million for a plan that would have allowed "proceed rapidly with the construction of structural works against the risk of flooding of the Seveso and Lambro ”. But then between appeals, arbitrations, contracts awarded and reassigned, and even the stoppage due to Covid, the works never actually started. A jammed mechanism that represents the national reality well: the Simplification Decree and the aid arriving from Brussels will be needed to unblock this type of construction site throughout the country. In Italy, the European country with the highest hydrogeological risk, 8 out of 10 construction sites are blocked by bureaucracy.
The Bresso tank, in Milan's North Park, was even frozen for two years due to legal wars. Now the mayor Sala has finally announced the green light, even if the path of the precious infrastructure could still be blocked, if the citizens against it do not withdraw the pending appeals. “The work – specified the councilor Marco Granelli – will consume 37 square meters of parkland but it will give back 109 in green areas as compensation. Citizens are rightly concerned, they already have Seveso on their doorstep, I understand that. But they shouldn't imagine a lake with water from the Seveso but with clean water from the groundwater that works as a sponge for a maximum of six times a year, for three days. With Senago and Milan we plan to reduce over a third of the floods".
