|
Keeping Disaster Beyond the Gates
By Chris Lehmann
All empires are ultimately destined to be history's flotsam,
but Venice seems poised to make this much more than metaphoric prophecy-speak.
The North Adriatic lagoon over which the city arose on alder poles well
over a millennium ago is rising steadily, and Venice's once rare acque
alte (high waters) are becoming extremely commonplace. Flood tides of
more than 31 inches inundated the city on 99 occasions in 1996; the more
general recent annual average is 50 high tides a year -- still enough
so that most of the city's inhabitants of ground-floor residences have
moved either up or out. By comparison, the city's Piazza San Marco, which
floods at a 27-inch tide, was flooded only seven times in 1900, and 20
times a year throughout the 1950s. Over the 1970s, it flooded 1,013 times.
The greater frequency, and deeper volume, of Venice's
flooding has a number of causes: the ill-advised dredging of the lagoon
to deepen shipping lanes for oil tankers; the pumping of the groundwater
beneath the city for industrial development; the neglect of the city's
canals, building walls and general infrastructure since World War II (to
this day, Venice has no modern sewage system, relying on the lagoon's
high and low tides to flush its wastewater out to sea). But the most potent
source of Venice's modern sogginess is also the one over which Venetians
have the least control: the steady rise of sea levels in response to global
warming.
In "Venice Against the Sea," veteran American journalist
John Keahey describes the remarkable architectural history that unwittingly
placed the once-noble republic in its current plight, and surveys the
bitter present-day political disputes over what can be done to stem the
tide. As he explains at the outset, Venice is, in geographical terms,
a quite literal freak of nature. "A lagoon is theoretically a transitional
phase in the building up, or breaking down, of things terrestrial," he
writes. "If left undisturbed over a relatively short period of time, a
lagoon becomes either land or sea. . . . The artificial restraints early
Venetians built into their lagoon have fought this natural cycle until
this very day."
Indeed, what's been remarkable about Venice's defiance
of nature's course is that it's been so successful for so long: By laying
the foundations of Venice on wooden pilings, the city's fathers actually
placed it on a layer of exceptionally solid earth beneath the lagoon's
sediments; the water surrounding the poles encased them in a vacuum that
worked to steady them further; and the alder "became stronger -- almost
petrified -- with each passing century."
This ingenious balancing act has kept Venice afloat
-- and, just as important, protected from would-be attackers -- for centuries.
It's only with the recent rise of the surrounding seas that so much of
Venice has become so regularly waterlogged. Keahey reports that "the earth's
temperature increased by at least 1.1 degree Fahrenheit . . . over the
last century. Within the last twenty-five years, temperatures seem to
be rising at a quicker rate." This may not seem like such a dramatic shift
-- except that by some estimates, the world today is "only five to nine
degrees warmer" than it was during the Ice Age. And as the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change has concluded, the last century's warming has
produced a "rate of sea-level rise . . . about ten times greater than
the average rate over the last 3,000 years."
But the global, inevitable sweep of a hotter climate
is just one of Venice's problems. It is also saddled with the task of
formulating some strategy of civic flood protection in a postwar Italian
polity that is all but allergic to long-term planning of any kind. After
the Allied powers vanquished Mussolini in 1943, they re-engineered the
structure of Italy's government, pitting scores of rival national parties
against one another in frail and ever-shifting parliamentary coalitions
-- and for good measure, they instituted a new layer of regional government,
which added another 20 bureaucratic sectors to mediate between municipal
and national bodies. The idea was to prevent Italy from reuniting into
an authoritarian or fascist power, and it succeeded beyond anyone's wildest
dreams; in the 55 years between the end of World War II and the turn of
the 21st century, Italy went through 58 national governments.
It's scarcely surprising, then, that even as the waters
in Venice continue to rise, the pace of political change is glacial. In
1973 -- already seven years after the worst flood in the city's modern
history -- the national government finally passed a vaguely worded "special
law" calling for a "united effort" to safeguard Venice, recommending in
particular the construction of retractable gates that would rise out of
the water as flood conditions worsen to repel the Adriatic's tides, and
keep the lagoon below flood levels. A full decade later, the Consorzia
Venezia Nuova (CVN) was founded; it is a private consortium of corporations
charged with defining the scope of Venice's flood troubles and mandating
the solution. The CVN has been pressing steadily for the gates' construction,
but its corporate composition, as well as its tight connections to the
country's political class, has made it vulnerable to charges from understandably
cynical citizens that it's out to feather the n! ests of the contractors,
engineers and civic leaders on its board and in its orbit.
Meanwhile, environmentalists and civic preservationists
claim that the gates would cause still more damage to the lagoon -- and
point out that much of the flooding within the city could be manageably
contained with less disruptive infrastructure improvements, such as sealing
canal walls and better floodproofing for buildings, walls and bridges.
Moreover, opponents of the gates plan argue that even by the best estimates,
the gates would only be operable for the next hundred years, at which
time engineers would have to devise some massive new remedy for still-higher
rising tides. But Silvio Berlusconi's new center-right government unexpectedly
announced last year that it intended to move forward with the gates' construction.
Keahey -- author of "A Sweet and Glorious Land," an
account of his re-creation of Victorian novelist George Gissing's tour
of Italy's Ionian coast -- is an admirably dispassionate chronicler of
the alternately epically stalled and intensely heated controversy over
Venice's fate.
He's clearly animated by a great love for the city,
but he also possesses a reporter's healthy skepticism about the deeply
politicized state of the debate, as well as an infectious curiosity about
how all things Venetian work, and could be made to work better. As a result,
ardent Venice preservationists will find precious little consolation in
this smoothly written, cautionary account of the far-ranging worldly forces
that are pushing one of the world's most magnificent cities ever farther
below sea level.
--
The Washington Post, April 2, 2002
|