‘We can’t wait’: Venice already seeking floods plan B five years after barriers’ launch | Venice

TThe Arsenale, the massive shipyard that was the engine of the Venetian Republic’s dominance for seven centuries, remains the core of the city’s control over the water. The northern part consists of cave-shaped brick warehouses. capannoniA ship that, in the 16th century, could produce one warship per day through a meticulously organized assembly line.

One of them now houses the operations center for Mose, the sprawling flood defense system that protects the city.

meaning of the name trial module elettromeccanico (experimental electromechanical module) and is a nod to the biblical character who parted the seas. Here’s what they say about the Venetians who saw their city devastated by storm waves: accept someone elseThere is something miraculous about this: huge, brightly colored flood barriers buried in the seabed in three bays between the lagoon and the Adriatic have saved Venice from possible floods 154 times since they were opened in 2020.

But even though Mose has only been in operation for five years, city officials are already looking for a plan B. Rising sea levels due to the climate crisis mean engineers have to raise flood barriers more frequently, damaging the lagoon’s ecosystem.

An alarming acceleration in sea level rise – an estimated one meter more by the end of the century – represents “the death knell for the city”, says Andrea Rinaldo, who manages Mose and is now also head of the Lagoon Authority’s newly appointed scientific committee tasked with finding out what could achieve this.

“If it were one meter more, you would have to close the Mose barriers an average of 200 times a year, which means it is almost always closed,” says Rinaldo. “When this happens, the lagoon loses its ability to be a transitional environment. It turns into a dirty pond.”

Tides create a natural exchange of water and sediment between the Venetian lagoon and the Adriatic. Elevated flood barriers block water flow, which encourages algae overgrowth. When algae die, they decompose, sucking all the oxygen out of the water and killing fish and other marine plants.

Rinaldo insists that Mose was not poorly designed. It was envisioned as a future project, but that future came true much sooner than engineers expected. It calls for immediate action. “You won’t have a lagoon. You won’t have a city. And all of this could happen in a time frame comparable to the time it took us to design and build Mose. We can’t wait.”

It took fifty years for Mose to be designed and put into operation after Venice experienced the worst flood in its history on November 4, 1966. The idea of ​​flood barriers was detailed in the 1970s and the module was built in the 1980s, but red tape and concerns about its environmental impacts delayed its implementation.

In 2014, Venice’s then-mayor, Giorgio Orsoni, was arrested on suspicion of corruption. His arrest uncovered a thread that exposed a network of nepotism and bribery that increased the cost of the project by millions of euros. Many Venetians were initially opposed to Mose because of his ballooning budget, his impact on the lagoon, and suspicion that he would always work. But then it happened, and Venice has remained dry ever since.

The inside of the Mose operations center in Arsenale North looks like a Bond villain’s hideout, or perhaps a tech startup in Silicon Valley: glass staircases, bright white walls and offices hidden inside frosted Perspex cubes. The control room has the feel of a war room, with a wall of curved screens showing meteorological conditions that could combine to create a storm surge.

One of the screens shows a satellite view of Venice; the boats look like white spit stains in the gray lagoon. Mose’s coach, Giovanni Zarotti, explains that the ebb and flow is never ignored. There is even an exact replica of the control room elsewhere in the Arsenale complex in case of a power outage or other technical problem.

It’s a well-oiled operation, but mistakes still happen. Zarotti said it was decided to close the barriers three hours before the water level was expected to reach a height that would cause flooding.

“Statistically, we trust God. We have a margin of error of 10 cm. If we predict 110 cm and order a closure, there may be a sudden drop in the wind and the water may rise only 98 cm,” he says.

Activating Mose has a significant economic impact; not only because closing the barriers costs the city up to €200,000 (£175,000) each time, but also because it halts maritime traffic from the gulf of Malamocco to the port of Marghera. During this year’s Venice carnival, barriers were raised 26 times in just three weeks, costing the city more than €5 million.

Zarotti said the team is trying to raise the barriers at each entrance one after the other to stagger the effect, and is considering increasing the activation level to 130 cm. But he concedes that the Venetians had become accustomed to Moses and were much less tolerant of even minor flooding. the last destroyer under water The experience in the city was that in 2019, the city was engulfed by 187 cm of water and 80% of the city was flooded.

“The Venetians now accept Moses as he is,” he says. “Many don’t even have fishing boats anymore. Imagine if you were six years old and never heard the sound of flood sirens.”

What the next project will be still needs to be defined. Rinaldo is excited about the intellectual possibilities of the current challenge. It plans to launch a global call for ideas from leading thinkers in a variety of different disciplines, from art and economics to history and science. Each group of experts will be awarded a grant and given one year to prepare a proposal, which will then be evaluated by a scientific advisory board. The selected projects will then be given to city officials for implementation.

“Venice is a test bed for how we will deal with these systems in the future,” he says, adding that this is a problem that cannot be solved with science and engineering alone.

He believes it is vital to completely redesign the city, especially to shift Venice’s economy away from its dependence on tourism, which poses as much of a threat to the city as rising waters. Otherwise, what he calls the jewel of the artistic heritage will be lost. He laughed. “On my corpse!”