Sixty years after the tragedy of the Vajont, which cost the lives of nearly two thousand people due to a gigantic flood caused by a landslide, a representation of the population of the province of Belluno was received by Pope Francis. "Reflecting on the disaster, one aspect strikes me: the tragedy was not caused by design or construction errors of the dam, but by the very fact of wanting to build an artificial basin in the wrong place. And all this why? Ultimately, for having put the logic of profit before the care of man and the environment in which he lives; so that, if your wave of hope is moved by fraternity, that wave that brought despair was caused by greed. And greed destroys, while fraternity builds".
Vajont, Mattarella at the monumental cemetery Fortogna
On the evening of October 9, 1963, the deadly wave wiped out entire villages and it was not a fatality, as was later ascertained by the investigation by the Ministry of Public Works. The Vajont dam, built to exploit the force of the waters of the Piave basin, would have had an extraordinary water containment capacity and would have produced a lot of electricity. However, the project managers deliberately ignored the risks as revealed by some technical reports, for example those of the Austrian technician Leopold Müller. The risks envisaged by the geologist were confirmed by a first landslide, three years before the disaster.
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Pope Francis, retracing that black page of Italy's history, comes to reflect on the present. "I never tire of repeating that caring for creation is not just an ecological factor, but an anthropological issue: it has to do with human life, as the Creator intended and arranged it, and it concerns the future of everyone, of the global society in which we are immersed. And you, in the face of the tragedy that can arise from the exploitation of the environment, bear witness to the need to take care of creation. This is essential today, as the common home is crumbling, and the reason is once again the same: the greed for profit, a delirium".
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