What I knew about Mazara del Vallo was little more than a tourist
brochure: a city of 50 thousand inhabitants, perhaps the most African
part of all Sicily due to its sea view, a land of high interpenetration
of mafia and freemasonry, light years away from how Pippo Fava depicted
it in the book Processo alla Sicilia, where he wrote that "in this
country they are all fishermen". I was there recently with a journalist
to investigate the coastal erosion of the Tonnarella beach, where ugly
beaches and obscene houses built on the sand are concentrated. We had
been told that one of the possible causes is the Transmed gas pipeline,
also called Enrico Mattei, composed of four pipes that have been laid
over the decades - the first in 1983, the last in 2012 - and which
carries gas from Algeria, passing through Tunisia and slipping for
hundreds of kilometers under the Mediterranean Sea. We were also
interested in trying to answer another question: how is it possible that
one of the most important infrastructures in Italy, where according to
the latest data from the Ministry of the Environment more than a third
of the gas consumed in Italy passes through, has never allocated
anything, on an economic level, to the territory that hosts it (except
for a little work at a local level during the laying of the pipes)? To
understand this, we reconstructed the complex management of the work:
the gas pipeline is owned by the state oil company Sotugat in the
Tunisian part, by the state company Sonatrach in the Algerian part, by
the TransMediterranean Company (a company halfway between the Italian
Eni and the Algerian Sonatrach) for the underwater part, by Snam in the
Italian part. Then there is Mariconsult, another company halfway between
Eni and Sonatrach, which deals with the management and maintenance of
the Transmed gas pipeline. A real quagmire that they solved easily in
Mazara: Eni is the only company to talk to. A vision that we have
embraced and that on the other hand has been confirmed especially after
the outbreak of the war in Ukraine: in recent years, in fact, Algeria
has replaced Russia as Italy's main gas supplier thanks to the role of
Transmed and above all thanks to the numerous visits to North Africa by
the Draghi and Meloni governments, in which Eni's CEO Claudio Descalzi
was the host. So we began our investigative work by asking the
six-legged dog. The company reminded us that from the underwater gas
pipelines what reaches Sicilian territory is the receiving terminal,
interconnected with Snam's national distribution network, so "no
royalties are due in relation to these gas pipelines". However, such a
crucial work has an inevitable environmental impact. An impact that has
not been quantified, and that Eni obviously continues to deny. Or
rather: the renewal of the concession, discussed in 2014 and
definitively approved in 2016, was not subjected to an environmental
impact assessment, because the work is considered strategic from an
energy point of view. In the absence of official studies, therefore,
citizens had to do it themselves. One of the first studies was carried
out by geologist Roberto Gallo and acquired by the Municipality in 2014.
Gallo reports a constant erosion of the coast in the stretch between the
port of Mazara del Vallo, the Tonnarella seafront up to the Capo Feto
marsh, about 5 kilometers of beach that are inexorably disappearing. It
is already possible to observe the sea devouring the beach, with the
sand reaching the road. Getting there on foot from the splendid historic
center of Mazara, where Arab and Norman architecture are exalted, was a
useful and bumpy route. The further you move away from the center, the
uglier the view becomes: after having flanked the Mazaro river, it is a
proliferation of roads and farmhouses without the harmony and beauty of
a few meters before. The Fata Morgana promenade begins just below the
highway pylons, with the inevitable palm trees and the sirocco wind that
is a constant. Gallo's work was used as a basis by the lawyer Fabrizio
Hopps who in 2022 was appointed as a consultant by the Municipality to
draft a report on the possible impacts and the resulting compensations.
Hopps estimates a possible compensation of around 20 million per year
compared to a municipal budget of around 45 million per year. However,
Gallo and Hopps' claim is naive and bourgeois: stripped of any
conflictual element, of the awareness of the balance of power and the
interconnection between Eni and the institutions, the claim seems to
have run aground. In a land where few speak but everyone has something
to say, in a city that is both opulent and crumpled, it is not
surprising that the two institutes of the National Research Council
present here - in Mazara and nearby Torretta Granitola - have not
developed a single study on Transmed. We tried to urge them to do so:
first they bounced us from one office to another, then they promised us
that if any institution were to urge them they could take action. More
useful, however, is the "old-style" activism of the Pro Capo Feto
association, according to which the damage caused by the pipeline does
not concern coastal erosion in the Tonnarella section but the
destruction of biodiversity in the eastern part of the coast, in the
Capo Feto marsh. Its main animator is the elderly Enzo Sciabica: a past
as president of the local Legambiente club, he participated and
stimulated all the discussion tables with all the interested parties. A
historical memory of those capable of citing by heart the protocol
number of each individual act and entire passages of documents. And yet
it remains isolated and not very effective. Instead, we need a
collective, radical and conflictual mobilization, capable of going
beyond local particularisms and also looking at synergies of struggle
with Algeria and Tunisia, where the Transmed pipes pass. Especially
because on these unresolved issues there are also two other possible
pipes hanging, to be added to the four existing ones that transport gas,
and which instead should transport hydrogen through the project known as
the South Corridor.
http://sicilialibertaria.it
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