In the country where everything often goes the other way around, it happens that first the construction sites for the construction of a project are opened and then those for building the roads to get there. Or perhaps the latter will never open. The case of the temporary motorway junctions serving the railway doubling is emblematic of a nation that lives caught between bureaucracy and disorganization and so the possibilities that they may arise are reduced with the passage of time. If that of Itala was rejected by the Ministry of the Environment, for the connections of Sant’Alessio Siculo and Nizza di Sicilia the conclusion of the verification of compliance is still subject to the release by the specialist Commission for environmental authorizations of the Region of the certification on the absence of valuable crops in the land, to the study on surface waters and to the environmental monitoring plan under the responsibility of Arpa Sicilia and to the landscape authorization conditioned by the sending of the project for the on-site use of the earth and rocks from excavation by the regional department of cultural heritage and Sicilian identity.
For Taormina, however, the process for verifying compliance is underway at the Ministry and the final documents are being drawn up to close it. Between endless procedures and requests that appear surreal, for temporary links which are scheduled for demolition, what could be the final blow comes from the engineer’s report. Placido Migliorino, the manager of the inspection office of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport who “vivisectioned” the A18 and A20.
The temporary ramps include, in addition to the redevelopment of the safety barriers, the modification of the roadway with the creation of three 3.25 meter wide lanes also on the Agrò and Fiumedinisi viaducts of the A18, affected by risk mitigation interventions proposed by the CAS due to the precarious static safety conditions: «The viaducts are neither adequate nor operational – writes Migliorino – but only passable with geometry reduced to two 3.50 meter lanes. The three-lane configuration is incompatible with the structural safety conditions and there are no margins to allow the implementation of what was envisaged by Webuild”. Will it be the de profundis for the junctions?
«The government and regional administration are significantly late in completing the authorization procedures – denounces the regional deputy Giuseppe Lombardo, mayor of Roccalumera – despite the fact that the railway doubling consortium has been ready for months with the preliminary activity in the areas where the ramps will have to be built». Meanwhile, trucks travel day and night on state, provincial and municipal roads between Scaletta Zanclea and Giardini Naxos, with inconveniences that are no longer bearable for the populations and the arteries themselves, dotted with potholes and depressions. «Heavy vehicles continue to speed carelessly along State Road 114 and on other roads in our community – highlights the mayor of Sant’Alessio Siculo, Domenico Aliberti – causing damage to the road surface and to parked cars. We are losing hope on the release, in the end it all falls on us mayors.”
In Alì Terme, the mayor Alessandro Triolo asks that heavy vehicles pass directly inside the new railway tunnel, thus bypassing the town where the State Road 114 gets clogged up every day, and that the temporary footbridge over the stream that connects with Nizza di Sicilia be reopened: «Since the Itala connection has been missed, all the flow towards Messina passes through us – he explains -. We cannot support this traffic any longer.”
With the reopening of the Agrò bridge between Santa Teresa di Riva and Sant’Alessio Siculo, scheduled for the end of the month, the trucks of the railway doubling will also have to cross State Road 114 at the ends of the two inhabited centers and this will produce further inconvenience, especially on the Santaresi side due to the presence of homes and commercial activities on via Stradella Catania, while on the Alessio side they will have to perform a dangerous maneuver on a curve to take provincial road 12: the possibility of leaving the footbridge built in 2016 in the stream is still standing and reserved only for trucks, as hoped by the mayors, it seems that it cannot find space and demolition is planned for the link road, also because studies and analyzes highlight how it represents an obstruction to the flow of the waters of the Agrò with risks of flooding on both banks. In the country where everything often goes the other way around.