“After three years of complaints, questions, meetings and reports, only today has the scandal emerged in the Control and Guarantee Commission regarding the issue of the Sant’Anna Bridge. It has emerged that the infrastructure has been excluded from the Three-Year Plan of Public Works, to date the technical-economic feasibility project necessary to reintegrate the infrastructure into the redevelopment plan has not been done”. This is the report of councilor Massimo Ripepi, the president of the Commission that heard the councilor for Public Works Franco Costantino, and the director of the sector, Bruno Doldo.
“Still doubts, uncertainties and no one who can say whether this bridge is safe or not. And while the safety of citizens is left to chance, we discovered that the procedures for carrying out core sampling had also been started, in October 2023, an intervention that however died at birth as the assignment of the works never proceeded”, explains Ripepi. “Once again, the administration was unable to answer our questions, discrepancies emerged: on the one hand, councilors and managers speak of maximum priority and urgent interventions, recognizing that no one can exclude the risk of the bridge collapsing; on the other, it turns out that this infrastructure has been incredibly excluded from the Three-Year Plan of Public Works, even the feasibility project is missing, so there has never been a real plan to make the bridge safe” Ripepi contested.
“But that’s not all. In October 2023, the project was launched with the intention of carrying out core sampling to verify the state of the structure, but inexplicably the intervention was stopped without any justification and without even being assigned the task. Today, months later, we still do not have a precise idea of the severity of the structural damage and the city continues to live in terror that a tragedy could occur at any moment. The Falcomatà administration therefore reconfirms its total inability to plan and prevent disasters. I have been repeating this for years and today the facts speak clearly: it is no longer a question of alarmism, but of reality. They accused us of exaggerating, of creating panic, but the truth is that we were the only ones to warn the city of the imminent danger. We were ignored and ridiculed, and now we are forced to pay the price for the incompetence of those who govern.”
Ripepi says: «The Commission was not slow in receiving the classic justifications and vain reassurances from an Administration that is the first to have no certainties about the safety and stability of the Bridge. We will not stop until we have obtained all the necessary explanations and until we finally see a concrete plan for making the bridge safe».