"Non esiste, una canzone per il Vajont. Il vostro silenzio, ... è quella canzone.". Marco Paolini, 9 ottobre 1997.
See & listen this on Youtube clicking here
Two reference YT channels:
A) vajont2003 and
B) vajont1963
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The patriotic saga of Italy raised the Piave to
the status of the "national river", and designated it as such, in 1917.
In the
war which was to have been the Fourth War of Independence, leading the country
in a leap beyond the Venetian frontiers (won by no means by armed might) already
gained from the Third. After two years of an immobile front on the Isonzo, streaming
blood from a dozen battles, the direction then changed with the famous defeat
at, and flight from, Caporetto, with the Austrians flooding onto the plain through
this breach. After a few days of fearing for the worst when it was believed
that they would only have been stopped on the Adige or Mincio, on the 1859-66
frontiers, the tide was stemmed on the Piave, something that was foreseen by
the not altogether stupid titch of a Ring who organised the defence.[1]
We all then learnt that the Piave was to be declined as a masculine, not as
a feminine substantive, laying to rest our schoolboy doubts.[2]
The river's name
entered popular poetry and legend. The old Neapolitan versifier E.A. Mario,
recently passed on, wrote verses and music which lost only by a short head to
Mameli's hymn in the competition for the national anthem. Can you recall the
ingenuous phraseology? Together with the infantry, battled the waves. Once
again a river was personified in literature, like in classical literature, as
defending the motherland, carrying to the sea piles of enemy corpses. The Piave
whispered: the foreigner shall not pass.
But now the Piave
has carried out to sea thousands of Italian corpses struck down by the apocalyptic
flood from the Vajont during the dark night of October 9-10th, and has lost
its title to nobility. Its legend was and is one of death, and there is no more
glory in carrying away the bodies of soldiers than of peaceful citizens caught
in their sleep. Then they were immolated to the never satiated with blood numina
of war, now to those of modern bourgeois and patriotic capitalist civilisation
and above all to the adorers of its science and technology.
It is not just today
that we suddenly desire to dishonour, along with those of wars between peoples,
the no less infamous killer deities of a civilisation which rusts and rots year
by year.
In Prometeo, 2nd
series no. 4, July-September 1952 we dedicated the article Politics and Construction
to this theme which, among the various examples of deadly disasters which constitute
real bankruptcies of scientific technique, recalled several cases of floods
and cited historical cases of mountain reservoir dams, recalling the history
of this skill from the Moors in Spain and Leonardo to the organisational inadequacies
of the modern hydraulic services in the period of great capital and monstrous
construction enterprises.
In France in 1959
there was the terrible Frejus catastrophe which, nevertheless, despite the collapse
of the dam which did not happen in the case of the Vajont basin, caused fewer
victims than the recent Italian catastrophe.
Then we found the
person responsible, the accused to be stood in the dock, but not in the manner
of the reckless pettifogging political prick of demagogic opportunism: it was
Progress, the lying myth which makes the poor in spirit and the starved wretches
bend their backs to it, ready to swear loyalty to this Moloch which every so
often and a little bit each day crushes them under the wheels of its obscene
carriage.
In the inhuman system
of capital, every technical problem boils down to an economic one, that of the
prize to be won by cutting costs and boosting returns. The old pre-bourgeois
societies had some residual time to think about safety and general interests.
As we recalled in the case of the Frejus dam, that too was a masterpiece of
brand new technology, it was light, slim and agile and so with a very modest
concrete and steel tonnage held back an enormous volume of water. But already
past-builders had realized that dams work by gravity, that is, they resisted
the incredible thrust of the liquid in that they were extremely heavy and so
did not collapse. We recalled that after several disasters in Spain and at Gleno
in Italy (1923) the theory was modified to take account of the hydraulic thrust
below, at the base of the dam and these were broadened and made more stable.
But the recent dams have obeyed (a mercenary science has obeyed) the sacrosanct
need for low costs, so they are built, as with the Frejus and Vajont, in an
arch, that is, with a curve that points out into the water pressure and spreads
the load onto the shoulders wedged into the valley sides. The dam thus becomes
less voluminous, less heavy and less costly and is made of highly resistant
materials. But then the pressure of the thrust on the two shoulders of the construction
grows massively because this depends on the water pressure borne on its back,
which is all the more massive the higher the dam is. Allowing for superlative
materials permitting the slimming of the dam and therefore of its shoulders,
the pressure on the natural rock is immense and the problem ceases to be the,
controllable, one of adjusting the arch of reinforced concrete to take the thrust
(this cannot be reduced), but of seeing if the rocky sides will crumble, ruining
the arch shaped dam. This was the error made at Frejus. Then too it was not
the mechanical and hydraulic engineers who were wrong, but - it is said - the
geologists called on to evaluate the strength of the rock.
The first problem
can best be tackled by mathematical calculations, performed either by a good
theoretician or by a computer, while the great theoretician sitting at it goes
through a few packets of cigarettes. It can be tested on a suitable scale model
in the laboratory.
The geological problem
is not one for the smoking saloon or the test tank. It is one of lengthy human
experience based on the proofs of historical building. Human and social experience.
For all modern engineering, in so far as it makes things which are not pocket
sized or cars, constructing things fixed to the Earth's crust, the key problem
is the land/building relationship (for a simple house, the foundations). There
are no perennially valid formulae but instead many skilful applications to choose
from after gaining hard-learnt experience. Taking a big salary and smoking in
front of the computer is not sufficient.
This experience ripens
over the centuries: whoever believes in progress and in the jest that last season's
latest discovery contains the wisdom of all time, may get a big salary, but
causes disasters, statistics for which, and they alone, show progress.
The very folk traditions among the uneducated masses,
the place names themselves can help the geological expert (if it really was
his fault) or, rather, the good engineer. Why ever was the Frejus narrows called
Mal Passet: a bad step indeed.[3] The mountain overlooking the reservoir and which
slid into it causing the terrible overflowing, why was it called Monte Toc?
Toc, in Venetian, means piece: it was a rock that split off in pieces and all
the inhabitants of the valley expected the landslide. Vajont, the name
of the reservoir, but previously of the pass, the gorge in which the dam was
wedged, all 263 meters (world-beating historical record!), in Ladino Friulian
dialect equals the Venetian "và zò", 'goes down', which collapses into the valley.
In fact past landslides have been mentioned, by the poor inhabitants living
on them.
Gortani, the geologist, in denying indignantly that he would ever have consented to the selection made
for the dam site, stated that the choice fell to the engineers. Quite so. The
philosophy of the two tragedies of Malpasset and Vajont (among the many others)
is identical. At the bottom of these reckless projects, dictated and imposed
by the hunger for profit, by an economic law to which all the navvies, the surveyor
and chief engineer must all bow, for which reason it is a foolish remedy to
uncover the guilty party at an inquest, lies the most idiotic of modern cults,
the cult of specialisation.
Not only is it inhuman to hunt down the scapegoat,
but also vain, since one has allowed this stupid productive society to arise,
made of separate sections. No one is guilty because, if someone takes off the
blindfold for a moment, he can say that he gave advice requested by the next
section, that he was the expert, the specialist, the competent person.
The science and skill
of producing, and especially of building, will, in the future society which
will kill the monster of economic return, of surplus-value production, be unitary
and indivisible. Not a man's head, but a social brain above ridiculous separated
sections will see without those useful blindfolds the immensity of each problem.
We read the report
of the engineer who for thirty years had dreamt of building the Vajont dam.
The good man is dead and does not need our defence. He was interested by the
purely morphological fact that with a little dam one could hold back a lot of
water and nowhere else would the return be so great at so little cost. A victim
of inexorable determinism.
Engineer Semenza, in his comment, is surprised by
the fact that one could have foreseen taking thirty years to develop his basic
idea now that the dam is complete. He did not think that the long time required
could be due to doubts over the correctness of the choice made. He thought that
the work had been well divided into sections protected by the right of not knowing
nor wanting to check one another's conclusions. In this illusion, which is not
blameworthy nor even a crime of commission or of omission, lies the omnipotence,
stronger than all and even the best engineer, of the modern capitalist superstition
of the division of labour, which Marx first condemned and only the revolution
will kill. The innocence of the designer is found in these words: Hundreds,
thousands of people, scientists, engineers, workers of all trades, worked to
complete this dam which should have closed the deep and narrow ravine of
the Vajont stream. Vajont gorge[4] as some guides call it, since
by nature it is so inaccessible and inhospitable. No one today would
think that the tour guide was right because he made money taking people up to
see the narrow gorge and not by working on the dam. Among the first were the
hydrologists who take rainfall and stream regime measurements, allowing one
to find the volume of water that would be held in the dam's reservoir. Higher
up the geologist examines the rock characteristics in detail, helped by the
most modern (oh come on now!) geophysical research. Meanwhile, the topographer
measures with microscopic precision (fashionable jargon!) the valley's configuration
so as to draw in the contour lines perfectly.
Let us leave out
the details of the design work or works, the ninety hours of computer time that
saved years of work by a team of mathematicians, the tales of the experiments
on wood and then concrete models... Only one passage interests us, the reference
to the ineluctable economic determinism. The design selected from among many
others, dating from 1956, fully exploits the valley's characteristics
which seem to have been made for the purpose of building an
exceptionally large dam.
The valley was made
to be exploited, and if that had not been the case ... one would have had to
have invented it.
With science, technology
and labour, does man exploit nature? No, not at all, and the intelligent relationship
between man and nature will arise when one stops making cost and design calculations
in money, but in physical and human quantities.
One can say exploiting
when a human group exploits another. The exploited collaborated with the exploiting
enterprise in the grandiose constructions of the mercantile period. Many people
were employed at Longarone and money was thrown around. The engineer has to
answer: did it rain gold? It is true that a skilled worker struck over the evident
danger of landslides, but it is also a bitter lesson that the worker who was
kicked out by the cursed surveyor because he was lame and would not have been
been able to escape in case of danger reacted in a violent manner. When the
pay is good, risks to human life are normal fare for the society of money and
wages.
The whole valley
ran the risk, and now it is dead. The solution to this problem will never be
found by the democratic method used by the currently available communists.
They are silly solutions
to these tragedies = which only show that bourgeois, money, private initiative,
market society has lived out its historical span and has by now become an even
more putrescent corpse than the ones it flung into the Piave = the ones bandied
about by newspapers fed on a gutless petty-bourgeois ideology, which perhaps
a hundred years ago could get by, and which claims justice, honesty and sentences
for those who get it wrong or cheat.
Socially and politically
we stand apart from those who ask, in the name of the dead who risked their
lives so that this iniquitous society could give them the only civilisation
it could, for three laughable enquiries:
The Ministerial Enquiry, called for by the ministers
who have their fingers in the pie and delegated to university professors loyal
to the system of sectorial responsibility with which one has the right not to
know others' subjects in this bureaucratic, scholastic and career-ridden system
which is drowning us.
The Parliamentary Enquiry, in which a group of people
with no knowledge and of contrasting ideologies (save that of the greed for
political success and ambition, which is the same from the extreme right to
the extreme left) study what they do not understand and then have a vote on
it in the assembly of politicians, that is, those who should be the first
to be tipped into the dustbin so as to liberate human society.
The judiciary,
which knows that its job is to apply a code rooted in tradition and the latest
constitution, useful for the petty thief and for the civil servant who in this
case was the only one to be banged up for making public a stolen document
which showed that the technical doubt over the dam was founded and long standing.
Three degrees of
tricking, not the dead, but the living that look to the horrible parties and
newspapers of all persuasions and drown in the unconsciousness of their destinies.
What is to be done
with the dam? Another problem that the bureaucratic, democratic administrative
mechanism will be unable to solve.
The dam was not flattened
so Engineer Semenza, if he were still alive, would be innocent, looking at it
from his sector's point of view.
But the problem was
the stability of the valley sides after they suddenly received a hydraulic pressure
of 26 atmospheres.
There was no alluvium at the bottom? What kind of
excuse is that? The liquid flowed fast through the gap and thus did not deposit
but eroded, creating over the centuries the conditions the topographers described
to poor Semenza. Thus the side was friable[5], certainly permeable, and, underneath, the massive
pressure on the strata that could yield caused Toc to slide.
The reservoirs created
upstream from the dam, which could have provided an empirical test result, were
put in place without being tested and without the order of the omnipotent state.
The dam was too high.
The law on this matter must be amended to state a legal maximum, let us say
under 100 metres. But then the return on the operation would fall below the
costs. Horror! The monopoly would not lose out, but only the consumption pattern
of those who depend on it, the same being the case if the state were to act
directly.
Reformism, not only
in Italy, flies this flag: the law passed, find the loophole.
An old engineer who
could understand geology, topography and building mechanics since he had an
old-fashioned degree said that the dam could collapse now. Behind it there is
no longer water, but a mixed deposit of water and earth (mud and slime) which,
with its higher specific weight, could exercise a greater thrust. Here there
are no models that hold good! The case is too indeterminate and even the computers
come up with nothing.
The Vajont basin
was cut in two by the huge landslide with a volume higher than that of the water
that it contained, a hill standing 100 metres above the water level.
But the smaller lake
remaining next to the dam can generate the pressure indicated by the aforementioned
engineer. It all depends on the height, that is the total, and the density of
the mud which will be decanted.
The basin must be
emptied, but not by blasting the dam with cannon-fire, but instead by installing
syphons over it to replace the devices destroyed by the disaster and abandoning
the potential energy which the turbine, if working, could have exploited.
We cannot believe
that the Ministry of Public Works could have thought that the wall would remain
in place to support something the size of an Alpine lake.
That sewer of death is no Alpine lake. The lakes
formed during the glaciation between very deep indestructible rock walls and
with a modest dam of natural morainic[6]
hills. They have been tested by Mother Nature over millions of years, not by
a Technical Commission!
Man certainly will
win against nature. And will do so thanks to a science, a technology, an administration
that will not be rented out to anyone.
Before bending nature
to our ends, we will have had to have bent the sinister social forces which
enslave us more than millions of cubic meters of grave stones and which condemn
the replies of today's experts to great rewards and grasping profits.
We must
dam the floods: not of water and earth, but of filthy lucre.
Footnotes
[1] In 1917, the Italian army was forced back to the Piave
river after the front broke at Caporetto (now Kobarid) on the Isonzo (now
Soca). In the Third War of Independence, the Italians, having previously made
an alliance with Prussia against Austria (8.4.1866), lost both on land (Custoza)
and by sea (Lissa). Prussia, however, prevailed, and the good offices of Napoleon
III assured Italy of Venetia all the same. The Adige and Mincio are two rivers
on the Po plain.
[2] In fact The names of rivers, lakes and mountains are
generally masculine. (...) Exceptions are, however, frequent due to old reasons,
thus la (fem.) Piave (and in modern and local use) il (masc.) Piave. Alfredo
Fansini "Grammatica Italiana" (Palermo, 1982 (1933)) pp. 34-5.
[3] Literally: bad step.
[4] In Italian: orrido, which means both gorge and horrible,
fearful etc..
[5] friable = apt to crumble
[6] moraine = continuous line of debris left by a glacier
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Ritagli di giornali, libere opinioni, ricerche storiche, testi e impaginazione di: Tiziano Dal Farra
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VOMITO, ERGO SUM. Nella foto sotto, il *Giardino delle bestemmie* attuale, un fal$o TOTALE dal 2004: falso storico, fattuale, e IMMORALE da 3,5 mln di Euro. Un FALSO TOTALE targato sindaco De Cesero Pierluigi/Comune di Longarone (2004) che da allora riproduce fedelmente in schema, come foste in un parco a tema di Rimini, il campo "B" di Auschwitz/Birkenau in miniatura. Ah, e i cippi sono di FALSO "marmo di CARRARA". E con questi $oggetti, come poteva essere diversamente? anche questa asserzione (oltreché un REATO) è un palese FALSO, autografato e *su carta intestata* dal Sindaco (ripeto, sottolineo, ribadisco) *delinquente*.
(PierLuigi De Cesero: Longarone's Mayor 1999/2009)
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