The card is strictly headed, needless to say, with the six-legged dog. Eloquent subtitle: Eni, the state body with the license to build and unbuild in the land of Sardinia. The symbol is the powerful one of those who have always dictated the law in petrochemistry, closures, leaks and environmental remediation. The documents in our possession are segregated in an encrypted dossier, which you can access only if you have a system for translating the computer codes needed to download dozens of files which, of course, very few should have known existed. The title of the project is in code: «Multi-company site of Assemini – Isola 5 area - variant of the reclamation project of the unsaturated soil matrix pursuant to Legislative Decree 152/06, the environmental code».
The polluted silence
The rule is consolidated, to pass as a normal technical act a plan which, on the other hand, has implications that are all to be discovered, with frightening admissions and confessions. Hundreds of pages, papers, maps and millions of euros spent and to be spent hide an operation on which the spotlight cannot be ignored. At stake is the industrial area of Macchiareddu, the one between Assemini and Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia. A petrochemical enclave, made up of salt and chlorosoda, black holes and chasms of pollution. Eni has been trying to get rid of it for years. With a "pneumatic hammer" he first demolished his production presence, giving away in a daring and in many ways still secretive way the chemical soul of his activity in Sardinia and, then, recently also the historic "Luigi Conti Vecchi", the company which governs the salt pans of Santa Gilla.
Announced rebates
Reluctantly, because every buyer has always demanded his indemnity from the environmental issue, the very heavy issue of reclamation, delegated to its green arm par excellence, Eni Rewind, remained with him. On the one hand, the document is a photograph of 15 years of announced and always endless reclamation works, of open and never completed construction sites. In reality, according to what the planners of the state body declare, the reclamations, those concerning this portion of land raped by the state industry and not only, were about to be concluded. The dossier speaks of a first approach to the recovery that would have reached a stage of 93% of the works imposed on ENI by the Ministry of the Environment. As they say, in that stretch of polluted area inside the plant, now in the hands of Sca, the Assemini Chemical Society, the finish line was in sight. And instead, one step away from the waving of the finish flag, the Ministry, on May 12 of last year, ordered a variation to the initial project, the one that had been completed for 93% of the planned works. The reason is put in black and white inside a pile of complicated and almost strategically incomprehensible papers. To translate them you have to go to the heart of the variant. The statements are so relevant that they reopen the chapter of characterizations, pollution checks and the same reclamations arranged in that area in a heavy way. In practice, a very heavy gash opens up on the whole question linked to statements all engraved on the headed paper of the state body.
The case of Isola 5
The first issue is that relating to the so-called "Isola 5", close to the road that runs through the entire industrial area on the front towards Cagliari, to the right of the main entrance to the chlor-soda plant. The Eni document sent to the Ministry of the Environment states: «In the Isola 5 area, located in the Plant Area of the Assemini plant, a reclamation intervention is currently underway which affects the unsaturated soil matrix as envisaged by the Operational Reclamation Project authorized by Decree, on a provisional basis at the start of the works on 28 January 2016, and definitively on 29 April three years later".
"Surprise" poisons
We do not entrust the story of the facts to assumptions. The details are circumscribed and documented: «The reclamation intervention was started in November 2018. During the execution of the works, which mainly consist in the removal of waste and enclosing/contaminated land for subsequent disposal, unexpected quantities and types of waste with respect to what is reported in the approved Operational Reclamation Project; in particular, in some portions of the areas to be excavated, the presence of Materials Containing Asbestos was found». And here is the first element that opens up a disturbing scenario, given that those reclamations had been decided after an apparently detailed "characterization" of the area. In practice, at the basis of the reclamation ordered by the competent Ministry there were investigations declared as very heavy on the territory, just so as not to miss anything from the territorial analyzes on pollution. In that same area, it is written in the document in our possession, «in 2008, during the execution works of the collector of the hydraulic barrier of the Plants area, in the excavation carried out near the PR9 well, located on Island 5, were found of buried industrial waste deriving from previous activities. In order to further verify the situation found, over 145 exploratory excavations were carried out in different sessions, and therefore various types of buried waste were found. During 2009 further exploratory excavations were carried out in order to deepen the information on the presence of waste and prepare the relative Reclamation Plan».
"Mistakes"
Those analyzes underlying the reclamation were so "precise" that the final surprise was devastating. It is the construction management under the responsibility of the Ministry that takes note of the polluting crime. The "Technical note on the analysis and evaluation of deviations from the project hypotheses" turns the spotlight on the case. These are not minor deviations from the previous analyses, but a real "black hole" ignored by the controls underlying the reclamation project. Way too much to pass it off as a covert fix. The plan approved in 2010 by the Ministry, the conclusion of which was scheduled for December 2022, is marked by such significant errors that it is legitimate to wonder how it was possible. A macroscopic error despite those many cores in the ground and subsoil, in a relatively limited area, less than 50,000 square meters.
Confession
The confession is all in the chapter of the document which we reproduce in its entirety: "Evidence found during the execution of the reclamation works". The content cannot hide the facts: «Between the middle of September 2020 and the beginning of November 2020, the Works Management of the reclamation interventions, with the technical support of the executing company, ordered, as part of of the reclamation in progress, the execution of a series of cognitive in-depth activities, functional to the reclamation in progress, which concerned the whole part of Macroarea 3 not yet reclaimed at the time and a good part of Macroareas 5 and 6. The activity became necessary since, during the reclamation operations carried out on the first macro-areas (1, 2, 4), the non-coincidence between the project forecasts and the real field evidence emerged: the areal distribution and volumetric waste actually found during construction and their typology deviated from the project assumptions (with an estimated increase of 20-25%)».
Ursulines & planners
The designers of Eni Rewind studied from the Ursulines and use the language that best suits a silent confession: «the non-coincidence has emerged». Translated: the errors of analysis are macroscopic and very serious, so much so that immediately afterwards they reiterate and reinforce the concept: «Furthermore, compared to the design forecasts, the amount of land that could potentially be reused for the purpose of backfilling turned out to be significantly lower, as most of the soils of stripping and enclosing the waste, characterized during the works, has shown that the concentrations of the contamination threshold have been exceeded". The words are devastating: the reusable contaminated soils "are clearly" lower than those envisaged in the project. There's not much more to add.
Questions like swords
Heavy questions remain suspended over Macchiareddu, like real swords of Damocles, without an answer: how was it possible to "make mistakes" in such a macroscopic way with the reclamation projects? How was it possible to "deny" those polluting evidences so relevant in the analysis and coring phases? And above all: is this "error" limited to Island 5 or are the "oversights" wider and concern the entire batch of analyzes and remediation of that industrial area? Certainly the documents that are emerging from the vault of the Ministry of the Environment reveal much more. Not only are these reclamations always on the high seas, from 2010 to today those concerning marginal parts of the compendium close to the Conti Vecchi salt pans have not yet been completed, but in that "paradise" of poisons there are gray areas over which silence dominates. There is an area, for example, the one code-named "Deco", Deposito Costiero, directly connected to the pier at sea, full of weighty truths. It is on that issue that the documents in our possession reveal an ongoing clash between the Ministry and Eni itself. The chapter concerns the discharges and concentrations of contaminants in a very vast area, the same that borders directly on the Conti Vecchi salt pans. A chapter to be revealed, between silences and disturbing maps of poisons, dispersed on the surface and in the deepest aquifers.
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