They won't be able to say they didn't see the signs. When you enter the Viale dei Caduti di Nassirya, skirting the Cagliari-Elmas airport, you will find one every fifty metres. They put them new and shiny, so that no one would forget them. Yellows that couldn't be more yellow, even phosphorescent, so as not to get lost at night. As if that wasn't enough, they even wrote it in big letters: "Rescue vehicles, emergency plan covered." It doesn't take a safety planning expert to understand that this is the access and exit route for ambulances, emergency vehicles, firefighters and anything else needed in an emergency. Not just any road, but the fundamental artery for a public place, let alone for an airport.
Kiosk & airport
In a country, Italy, where they close a "kiosk" on the beach if you don't have the exit route signposted like in an airport, it can happen, however, that they suddenly turn into an emergency route for you international airport such as that of Cagliari in a road crossroads serving Ikea and Leroy Marlin, commercial business and so on. The "life avenue", the road of life, as the Americans call it, should be inviolable, free from any obstacle, dedicated "exclusively" to that event that everyone hopes will never happen, but for which one must be farsighted and visionary , prepare without improvisation.
Fratelli d'Italia councilor Cristina Usai has submitted a question to the Todde administration.
Claudio Modesto Ronchi
On the altar of help
In Sardinia, however, a shopping center to be built a stone's throw from the airport is well worth the sacrifice of that emergency road, transformed, with many silences and many complicities, into the entry and even exit of thousands of customers from the slot machine of large-scale distribution. Those reclamations that were never carried out were not enough, by the very planning and documented admission of that former industrial area which belonged to the Fas, now the sacrilege is discharged on the emergency route of the airport. It is enough to read the documents to understand what is happening in that land of pollution and business.
Pike jump
The communication to ENAC from the Villa del Mas company, owner of what has now been quickly transformed into an industrial esplanade, is a triple leap: it even goes so far as to classify the contrary opinion of the Civil Aviation Authority as a "mistake ” when accessing the Municipality's IT portal. In reality, it is anything but a mix-up: the contrary opinion is linked to the attempt to offload all the traffic from the shopping center directly onto the airport's emergency-rescue route. Therefore, not trifles, but impressive reliefs. Enac placed, as was right, under the magnifying glass "the desire to create a second access/exit route from the shopping center which would use a section of the road serving the airport, demonstrating the need to know the vehicular flows generated and attracted by the shopping center and their compatibility with the same general flows of the airport, in order to avoid possible congestion phenomena". An evaluation which ledENACto express a "negative opinion" on the merits.
Flying traffic
The answer that the shopping center would not have created "vehicular overload" is a note written by none other than Studio Professionisti Associati Srl, i.e. the designers of the shopping centre. In short, like asking the fox if he closed the chicken coop gate properly. After the at least "risky" statement about the non-existence of a "vehicle overload" resulting from the new centre, ENAC, however, begins to change direction. To sign the reverse and surrender, the Civil Aviation Authority must demonstrate to most people that it dictates the conditions: «1. ENAC reserves the right at any time to close access to the roundabout on the airport grounds for security and safety reasons. in conditions of high traffic peaks generated at times by the airport itself; 2. The ramp connecting the shopping center and the airport road intercepts the area where the construction of a car park is planned. In order not to jeopardize the functionality and continuity of the car park itself, it is required that the method of construction of the overpass must allow the passage of vehicles underneath it between the two sub-areas of the car park that will be created".
The conditions for surrender
The conditions of surrender are, however, to be formalised: «In order to fully implement the project in question, an adequate protocol must be stipulated between this company, Enac, Sogaer and the competent local authorities for the definition of the methods of acquisition of the areas, of cadastral registration and for the determination of competence regarding maintenance and management of the same". In the same note, however, there is a postscript of no small importance: «In the margin of the above, it is stated that the Municipality of Elmas which reads a copy of this document, does not have the approved Risk Plan envisaged by the 5th co. of the Art. 707 of the Navigation Code and therefore new works and/or activities cannot be authorized in the areas included therein".
Public gift
The Municipality of Elmas, however, was not too worried: despite the contrary opinion of the state civil aviation body and the severe warning, it had already approved everything. That flyover, despite the airport development plan and safety plan still being missing, is being transformed into a fundamental road artery for the future commercial center. A sort of public "gift" to that forty-hectare private area which did not have sufficient exit routes for the thousands of expected "commercial users". A "flying" stretch of road to go over the railway tracks and send that traffic directly into the "rescue" lane of the airport. It matters little if that choice will forever affect the airport grounds and security. Moreover, it would be unthinkable to create a new safety artery on the other front: on the remaining sides of the take-off and landing runways, in fact, there are only plains of water, those of the surrounding lagoons.
Daring encounters
Behind this at least "risky" decision to transform an emergency lane into a road for Ikea & company, however, there are implications full of mysteries and "daring" meetings to say the least to define the details of the operation, including the stipulation of the protocol by agreement.
The way of "Reverse"
After ENAC's contrary opinion and the feeble openings to modifying the state position, in fact, a real hunt for the State body's reverse gear is unleashed. The emails of interested parties are swarming, with cross-exchanges such as to make it clear that the match is a question of life or death, obviously for the shopping centre. Nobody seems to care about airport security. Villa del Mas, the company of Maurizio De Pascale, president of Confidustria and the Chamber of Commerce of Cagliari, owner of 94% of the shares of Cagliari airport, writes like a river in flood: it is urgent to authorize the overpass to make the system work shopping center to come.
Swollen river
The whirlwind of communications between De Pascale and ENAC is incessant: a request is made to expressly confirm the compatibility of the overpass with the airport development plan. The correspondence becomes "fluvial" after 28 March 2017. To be defined is the formal act of ENAC's about-face after the negative opinion expressed by the representative of the State Body during the services conference.
The Rome summit
The meeting is Roman. The appointment is at 3.30 pm on 13 July 2017. Participating for Enac are engineer Franco Conte, for Villa del Mas Maurizio De Pascale, who at the same time, however, is also President of the Chamber of Commerce of Cagliari and, therefore, owner of a majority of 94% of the airport's shares. In other words, it seems like an entirely home-grown operation. The position of Sogaer, the company that manages the airport, was not received at that meeting in the capital's buildings.
The “traffic light” pact
The agreement ends in a daring way, with the provision of "a traffic light" in the shopping center in case of excessive traffic. It seems surreal, but it's all true. A decision that goes well beyond the construction of a flyover, but if anything, as emerges from the papers and the protagonists, it is a large-scale operation aimed at making the airport one with the shopping center, putting the airport serving private and commercial business. In fact, the "province" with which the birth of the mega Ikea & Co. shopping center was announced, which according to the creators, would have been directly connected to the airport check-ins, so to speak, before entering airport to cross the counters of the private "market".
Factotum engineers
Last note, in the approved and authorized plan for the shopping centre, the solution of offloading the traffic from the shopping center to the airport had never been envisaged. Just look at the documents of the project proposed to the Municipality and the Region. It was always drawn up by the same Spa studio, Studio Professionisti Associati, with leading design partners who were openly members of the Board of Directors of F2i, the financial fund which in any case would like to "make" Cagliari airport its own. It is still the same professional firm that justifies and argues for the reversal, albeit a few years later, when the attempt to privatize the Cagliari airport became more insistent.
Self-defense or responsibility
ENAC, therefore, has little time to think about it again, perhaps in the context of self-protection, albeit in progress. That "green light" to use the "rescue" route as an artery dedicated to commercial affairs weighs heavily on the future of the airport and its safety. Objective and subjective responsibilities, when it comes to emergencies and rescue operations, are not frills. And in all this continuous reversal of positions, first the protection of the historic buildings and then the shameless demolition, first the ban on the use of the emergency lane of the airport and then the green light to pour all commercial traffic into that thoroughfare aid, more and more overlaps of roles, functions and interests emerge. A delicate chapter, an explosive mix of public and private interests, all to be discovered.
