Here's how they detect pollution in Sulcis
In the industrial center and in the territory, controls and instruments have been left behind by 30 years. Checks every three months on powders
The anonymous disclosure breaks into the “stranded” gas tanker dossier when the scandal of the prohibited seabed in the industrial port of Sulcis has just exploded in the high environmental crisis area of Portovesme. When maps and coordinates reach the editorial office, the Istituto Superiore di Sanità had just finished dictating a resounding opinion against that floating regasifier in the heart of an area devastated by pollution and closed factories. The excerpts of georeferenced plans with latitudes and longitudes seem like a treasure hunt between chimneys and wind turbines, between landfills and disused quarries. The object of the dispute is certainly perceived: the industrial area of Portovesme and its state of health, or rather of illness. The only explicit "armored" detail in the pen drive is a list of locations, the most disparate, detailed as a sort of compass for the unwary in Sulcis.
The encrypted map
There are coordinates to the north and east, to be crossed on a road network worn beyond belief, as if time were stopping here with sudden strokes of hand brakes. There is no factory yet open, or already closed, where the faded flags of the endless struggles of the workers are not waved. The more you delve into these symbols of industrial archeology, the more you realize that the history of “disposable” Sardinia is increasingly consumed in a landscape of rust and abandonment. The industrial rubble can no longer be counted, the conveyor belts, one vault of coal and another of ash, bauxite and galena, fall apart, the trucks, once closed, another half-open, travel at a reduced pace, from the port "Stranded" up to the furnaces that are still burning.
Sa Pyramid
The most explicit name of the encrypted map in our hands is “Sa Piramide”, the symbol of that nefarious violence that struck this territory when the environment was considered a useless ornament, to be plundered and devastated. Before it was an uncontrolled landfill, now it's reshaped as if that mountain of poisons had undergone a facelift to face eternity. The access codes at the point indicated by the map lead to an unknown location, right on the rocky alleys upstream of that gigantic pile of industrial waste, now apparently sealed and controlled. When you cross the last dusty path, before reaching the coordinate set in the August papyrus, you feel like a whip to the brain that 120-meter-diameter blade slicing the sky, looking for wind and incentives. In the distance you perceive, between the green of the scrub and some tall trees, a white "point" suspended on the only tree that looks at the chimneys that stand out towards the industrial port, the one forbidden for the shallow waters.
Fortune tellers of the environment
To get close, you have to break into land as scorched as a crucible, dusty and dry like a desert strewn with industrial dust. The coordinates of the map for the point “P5 Sa Piramide” are exact, as if they had never moved for at least forty years, since in this enclave of poisons there has been talk of environmental pollution. Everything here is surreal. Climbed between branches and foliage, enclosed between vegetation and brambles, stands a plastic “bucket”, the typical one for tanned olives, covered by a mosquito net fixed on the circumference by a badly placed wire. Stuff from "fortune tellers" of the environment. The only indication is on that parcel tape: initials, place and date, without year: June 29.
Buckets for seers
For the rest, nothing more. The one placed in Sa Piramide is the first of the six "buckets" for "seers" of the environment, placed by none other than Arpas Sardegna, the agency that should take care of the environmental protection of the island. It should, in fact. In the days when the Istituto Superiore di Sanità called for in-depth studies on air quality in one of the most polluted industrial areas in Italy, decreed as Sin, Site of National Interest for Pollution, a gruesome scenario emerges on the controls to which the Sulcis is subjected. In this land devastated by industries that first robbed the environment and then fired it, there is no cancer registry, the degree of pollution is ignored, perhaps deliberately.
Crude methods
People die of tumors more than anywhere else, they say. However, no one has data, studies, analyzes. And the picture we are about to tell you reveals a dramatic truth: environmental controls are entrusted to crude methods, devoid of any serious and objective feedback, with buckets scattered here and there, to be recovered every three months to find nothing. No judge could ever give credibility to those "domestic" containers scattered under the plants, with branches and leaves that prevent any "receptive" capacity of "sedimentable dust" that should record the state of health of the environment. Tribal stuff that belongs to precursor methods of measuring "environmental" dust.
The bucket game
The “bucket” game unfolds in six sites in Portoscuso: in addition to Sa Piramide there are Generuxi, Perdaias, the Paringianu Purifier, Concali Arrubiu, Casa Figus-purifier and Palazzo Gardenia. And then two in Carbonia, in Cortoghiana and at the Distributore of Flumentepido, two in Gonnesa, at the nuraghe of Seruci and in Nuraxi Figus, one in Is Bingias in the municipality of San Giovanni Suergiu and one in Punta Dritta in the territory of Sant'Antioco. An environmental control system that makes the technicians of the sector shudder, those who know perfectly well that for decades those detection methods have been useless and backward. Just turn to the best equipped environmental protection agencies to understand that those "buckets" are medieval "huddles" unable to measure any kind of pollution. The deposimeters are now electronic and with photocells, capable of measuring humidity, quantity and solidity of the powders. Essential tools for assessing air quality in a delicate and risky area such as that of Portoscuso. Here too, as elsewhere, it is not a question of putting work in factories at risk to protect the environment and health, but rather the sacrosanct obligation to guarantee health to those who work and to the citizens who live in these territories.
Pollution in the dark
A single element is enough to understand the seriousness of the situation: in Sulcis a serious environmental report has never been carried out based on the methodologies in line with the Istisan Reports, those adopted by the Higher Institute of Health. The quantity of emissions from various sources, yesterday and today, including dust related to old disused activities, but always present in the industrial area, should have required a detailed verification and monitoring of the territory, starting from the contamination of soils with consequent danger to the food chain. All polluting elements dispersed into the atmosphere and partly deposited on the ground as a result of the interaction of atmospheric agents (precipitation, wind, temperature). The continuous and efficient measurement of the "deposition" rates is the only possible action to acquire information on the real contamination situation of an industrial area such as Portovesme and on the consequent assessment of the exposure risk for the population. The question is a must: Who has an interest in not measuring the degree of pollution? Why, despite the millions of euros that regional agencies cost annually, are serious investments not made in environmental monitoring?
Control units of the "masters"
Certainly the story raised by the Institute of Health in relation to the polluting load on the industrial area of Portovesme and the surrounding areas reopens a real gash on the industrial center of Sulcis, on the many public money spent and the very few, and very often useless, interventions carried out on an environmental level, starting from the lack of controls. Last data: for the measurement of dust with health impact there are 5 control units in the Province, theoretically controlled by Cagliari, because in the Arpas of Southern Sardinia there are no mobile equipment to verify its correct functioning. There is no need to worry: the other control units, located throughout the territory, are all owned by the industries.
