MILAN (ITALPRESS) – “The choice of whether or not to build the Bridge over the Strait of Messina is political and not technical, what we can say is that as a Group with the supply chain we have all the technical skills and technologies to build it well, without risks, and with the utmost respect for legality, as we prove every day in Italy and around the world by designing, building and delivering complex works.” This is what Pietro Salini, Webuild CEO, said as a guest today on ReStart on Rai 3. “This project is part of a much broader infrastructure investment plan brought forward by the Meloni government and Minister Salvini. Realizing this work means giving the 5 million Sicilian citizens the opportunity to be connected to the country like everyone else, with the same rights,” he added. “It means concretizing an articulated infrastructure plan by making sure that the high-speed rail on which we have already invested more than 100 billion euros in Italy reaches Sicily, where perhaps never before have we been making huge investments in infrastructure.”We have to envision a broad infrastructure development plan for Sicily within which we have been working on a plan capable of addressing and solving in two years the serious problem of water and drought with market intervention of interested investors, responding to what the Sicilian Region has requested,” Webuild’s CEO stressed. As we are demonstrating every day with the plants built in the Middle East, with our plan we can put an end once and for all to the water emergency suffered by more than 2.3 million Sicilians in critical areas, subject to water rationing and aggravated by the precarious state of conservation of the aqueduct networks and the reservoir system,” Salini continued. “With the Bridge project, Italy is projecting itself on the world stage with an incredible work from the engineering and transportation point of view. The project also includes important connecting works on the Sicilian and Calabrian sides that are functional to the Bridge, works that are not functional to the Bridge and environmental mitigation works, because together, Reggio Calabria and Messina give rise to a great metropolis,” he added. “In Sicily, in fact, three underground railway stops will be built, which, together with the Villa San Giovanni, Reggio Calabria and Messina stations, will give concreteness to the interregional metropolitan system for the Strait area, a metro system serving its more than 400,000 inhabitants. In Calabria, among other things, a multifunctional directional center will be built. “The Bridge Project “was awarded to the Eurolink consortium following an international tender, and today Webuild is working with the Spaniards from Sacyr, with whom we have already carried out the extraordinary work of widening the Panama Canal, and the Japanese from IHI, who specialize in bridges and cables. With these skills, the Bridge can be done,” said Salini again, who, on the issue of faults, recalls that clarity is needed on what a fault is. “Of inactive faults there are endless and everywhere in the earth’s crust, even in areas not subject to seismic risk, as, for example, under the center of Milan. Only active and capable faults should be taken into account in the design of works. The fault that has been much talked about these days is not large suspension bridges built in highly earthquake-prone areas such as the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Japan, which withstood the devastating 1995 Kobe earthquake, and the Çanakkale Bridge in Turkey, which crosses the Dardanelles Strait with a central span of 2023 meters, and which was built precisely on the basis of the deck model developed for the Messina Strait Bridge. These examples show that it is possible to build safe and durable structures even in areas of high seismic hazard and geologically complex contexts. That the Bridge can be made is one fact, that it is safe is another fact, whether it is to be made or not is a choice for Italy,” Salini concluded.
– Webuild press office photo –
(ITALPRESS).
