The patriotic saga of Italy raised the Piave to the position
of the national river, and designated it as such, in 1917. In
the war which was to have been the Fourth War of Independence,
leading the country in a leap beyond the Venetian frontiers
(won by no means by armed might) already gained from the
Third. After two years of an immobile front on the Isonzo,
streaming blood from a dozen battles, the direction then
changed with the famous defeat at, and flight from, Caporetto,
the Austrians flooding onto the plain through this breach.,
After a few days of fearing for the worst when it was believed
that they would have been stopped only on the Adige or Mincio,
on the 1859-66 frontiers, the tide was stemmed on the Piave,
something that was foreseen by the not altogether stupid titch
of a Ring who organised the defence (1). We all then learnt
that the Piave was to be declined as masculine, not as a
feminine substantive, laying to rest our schoolboy doubts (2).
The river's name entered popular poetry and legend. The old
Neapolitan versifier E.A. Mario, recently passed on, wrote
verses and music which lost only by a short head to Mameli's
hymn in the competition for the national anthem. Can you
recall the ingenuous phraseology? "Together with the infantry,
battled the waves". Once again a river was personified in
literature, like in classical literature, as defending the
motherland, carrying to the sea piles of enemy corpses. "The
Piave whispered: the foreigner shall not pass".
But now the Piave has carried out to sea thousands of
Italian corpses struck down by the apocalyptic flood from the
Vajont during the dark night of October 9-10th, and has lost
its title to nobility. Its legend was and is one of death, and
there is no more glory in carrying away the bodies of soldiers
than of pacific citizens caught in their sleep. Then they were
immolated to the never satiated with blood numina of war, now
to those of modern bourgeois and patriotic capitalist
civilization and above all to the adorers of its science and
technology.
It is not just today that we suddenly desire to dishonour,
along with those of wars between peoples, the no less infamous
killer deities of a civilisation which rusts and rots year by
year.
In Prometeo 2nd series no. 4, July-September 1952 we
dedicated the article Politics and Construction to this theme
which, among the various examples of deadly disasters which
constitute real bankruptcies of scientific technique, recalled
several cases of floods and cited historical cases of mountain
reservoir dams, recalling the history of this skill from the
Moors in Spain and Leonardo to the organizational inadequacies
of the modern hydraulic services in the period of great
capital and monstrous construction enterprises.
In France in 1959 there was the terrible Frejus catastrophe
which, nevertheless, despite the collapse of the dam which did
not happen in the case of the Vajont basin, caused fewer
victims than the recent Italian catastrophe.
Then we found the person responsible, the accused to be
stood in the dock, but not in the manner of the reckless
pettifogging political prick of demagogic opportunism: it was
Progress, the lying myth which makes the poor in spirit and
the starved wretches bend their backs to it, ready to swear
loyalty to this Moloch which every so often and a little bit
each day crushes them under the wheels of its obscene
carriage.
In the inhuman system of capital, every technical problem
boils down to an economic one, one of the prize won by cutting
costs and boosting returns. The old pre-bourgeois societies
had some residual time to think about safety and general
interests. As we recalled in the case of the Frejus dam, that
too was a masterpiece of brand new technology, it was light,
slim and agile and so with a very modest concrete and steel
tonnage held back an enormous volume of water. But already
past-builders had realized that dams work by gravity, that is,
they resisted the incredible thrust of the liquid in that they
were extremely heavy and did not collapse. We recalled that
after several disasters in Spain and at Gleno in Italy (1923)
the theory was modified to take account of the hydraulic
thrust below, at the base of the dam and these were broadened
and made more stable. But the recent dams have obeyed (a
mercenary science has obeyed) the sacrosanct need for low
costs, so they are built, as with the Frejus and Vajont, in an
arch, that is, with a curve that points out into the water
pressure and spreads the load onto the shoulders wedged into
the valley sides. The dam thus becomes less voluminous, less
heavy and less costly and is made of highly resistant
materials. But then the pressure of the thrust on the two
shoulders of the construction grows massively because this
depends on the water pressure borne on its back, which is all
the more massive the higher the dam is. Allowing for
superlative materials permitting the slimming of the dam and
therefore of its shoulders, the pressure on the natural rock
is immense and the problem ceases to be the, controllable, one
of adjusting the arch of reinforced concrete to take the
thrust (this cannot be reduced), but of seeing if the rocky
sides will crumble, ruining the arch shaped dam. This was the
error made at Frejus, then too it was not the mechanical and
hydraulic engineers who were wrong, but - it is said - the
geologists called on to evaluate the strength of the rock.
The first problem can best be tackled by mathematical
calculations, performed either by a good theoretician or by a
computer, while the great theoretician sitting at it goes
through a few packets of cigarettes. It can be tested on a
suitable scale model in the laboratory.
The geological problem is not one for the smoking saloon or
the test tank. It is one of lengthy human experience based on
the proofs of historical building. Human and social
experience. For all modern engineering, in so far as it makes
things which are not pocket sized or cars, constructing things
fixed to the Earth's crust, the key problem is the
land/building relationship (for a simple house, the
foundations). There are no perennially valid formulae but
instead many skillful applications to choose from after
gaining hard-learnt experience. Taking a big salary and
smoking in front of the computer is not sufficient.
This experience ripens over the centuries: whoever believes
in progress and in the jest that last season's latest
discovery contains the wisdom of all time, may get a big
salary, but causes disasters, statistics for which, and they
alone, show progress.
The very folk traditions among the uneducated masses, the
place names themselves can help the geological expert (if it
really was his fault) or, rather, the good engineer. Why ever
was the Frejus narrows called Mal Passet: a bad step indeed
(3). The mountain overlooking the reservoir and which slid
into it causing the terrible overflowing, why was it called
Monte Toc? Toc, in Venetian, means piece: it was a rock that
split off in pieces and all the inhabitants of the valley
expected the landslide. Vajont, the name of the reservoir, but
previously of the pass, the gorge in which the dam was wedged.
all 263 meters (world-beating historical record!) in Ladino
Friulian dialect equals the Venetian va zo, goes down, which
collapses into the valley. In fact past landslides have been
mentioned, by the poor inhabitants living on them.
Uortami, the geologist, in denying indignantly that he would
ever have consented to the selection made for the dam site,
stated that the choice fell to the engineers. Quite so. The
philosophy of the two tragedies of Malpasset and Vajont (among
the many others) is identical. At the bottom of these reckless
projects, dictated and imposed by the hunger for profit, by an
economic law to which all the navvies, the surveyor and chief
engineer must all bow, for which reason it is a foolish remedy
to uncover the guilty party at an inquest, lies the most
idiotic of modern cults, the cult of specialization. Not only
is it inhuman to hunt down the scapegoat, but also vain, since
one has allowed this stupid productive society to arise, made
of separate sections. No one is guilty because, if someone
takes off the blindfold for a moment, he can say that he gave
advice requested by the next section, that he was the expert,
the specialist, the competent person.
The science and skill of producing, and especially of
building, will, in the future society which will kill the
monster of economic return, of surplus-value production, be
unitary and indivisible. Not a man's head, but a social brain
above ridiculous separated sections will see without those
useful blindfolds the immensity of each problem.
We read the report of the engineer who for thirty years had
dreamt of building the Vajont dam. The good man is dead and
does not need our defence. He was interested by the purely
morphological fact that with a little dam one could hold back
a lot of water and nowhere else would the return be so great
at so little cost. A victim of inexorable determinism.
Engineer Semenza, in his comment, is surprised by the fact
that one could have foreseen taking thirty years to develop
his basic idea now that the dam is complete. He did not think
that the long time required could be due to doubts over the
correctness of the choice made. He thought that the work had
been well divided into sections protected by the right of not
knowing nor wanting to check one another's conclusions. In
this illusion, which is not blameworthy nor even a crime of
"commission" or of "omission", lies the omnipotence, stronger
than all and even the best engineer, of the modern capitalist
superstition of the division of labour, which Marx first
condemned and only the revolution will kill. The innocence of
the designer is found in these words: "Hundreds, thousands of
people, scientists, engineers, workers of all trades, worked
to complete this dam which should have closed the deep and
narrow ravine of the Vajont stream. Vajont gorge (4) as some
guides call it, since by nature it is so inaccessible and
inhospitable". No one today would think that the tour guide
was right because he made money taking people up to see the
narrow gorge, not by working on the dam. "Among the first were
the hydrologists" who take rainfall and stream regime
measurements, allowing one "to find the volume of water that
would be held in the dam's reservoir". "Higher up the
geologist examines the rock characteristics in detail, helped
by the most modern (oh come on now!) geophysical research."
"Meanwhile, the topographer measures with microscopic
precision (fashionable jargon!) the valley's configuration so
as to draw in the contour lines perfectly."
Let us leave out the details of the design work or works,
the ninety hours of computer time that saved years of work by
a team of mathematicians, the tales of the experiments on wood
then concrete models ... Only one passage interests us, the
reference to the ineluctable economic determinism. "The design
selected from among many others, dating from 1956, fully
exploits the valley's characterics which seem to have been
made for this purpose of building an exceptionally large dam".
The valley was made to be exploited, and if that had not
been the case ... one would have had to have invented it.
With science, technology and labour, does man exploit
nature? No, not at all, and the intelligent relationship
between man and nature will arise when one stops making cost
and design calculations in money, but in physical and human
quantities.
One can say exploiting when a human group exploits another.
The exploited collaborated with the exploiting enterprise in
the grandiose constructions of the mercantile period. Many
people were employed at Longarone and money was thrown around.
The engineer has to answer: did it rain gold? It is true that
a skilled worker struck over the evident danger of landslides,
but it is also a bitter lesson that the worker who was kicked
out by the cursed surveyor because he was lame and would not
have been been able to escape in case of danger reacted in a
violent manner. When the pay is good, risks to human life are
normal fare for the society of money and wages.
The whole valley ran the risk, and now it is dead. The
solution to this problem will never be found by the
"democratic" method used by the currently available
communists.
They are silly solutions to these tragedies - which only
show that bourgeois, money, private initiative, market society
has lived out its historical span and has by now become an
even more putrescent corpse than the ones it flung into the
Piave - the ones bandied about by newspapers fed on a gutless
petty-bourgeois ideology, which perhaps a hundred years ago
could get by, and which claims justice, honesty and sentences
for those who get it wrong or cheat.
Socially and politically we stand apart from those who ask,
in the name of the dead who risked their lives so that this
iniquitous society could give them the only civilization it
could, for three laughable enquiries:
* The Ministerial Enquiry, called for by the ministers who
have their fingers in the pie and delegated to university
professors loyal to the system of sectorial responsability
with which one has the right not to know "others' subjects" in
this bureaucratic, scholastic and career-ridden system which
is drowning us.
* The Parliamentary Enquiry in which a group of people with no
knowledge and of contrasting ideologies (save that of the
greed for political success and ambition, which is the same
from the extreme right to the extreme left) study what they do
not understand and then have a vote on it in the assembly of
"politicians", that is, those who should be the first to be
tipped into the dustbin so as to liberate human society.
* The judiciary, which knows that its job is to apply a code
rooted in tradition and the latest constitution, useful for
the petty thief and for the civil servant who in this case was
the only one to be banged up for making public a "stolen"
document which showed that the technical doubt over the dam
was founded and long standing.
Three degrees of tricking, not the dead, but the living that
look to the horrible parties and newspapers of all persuasions
and drown in the unconsciousness of their destinies.
What is to be done with the dam? Another problem that the
bureaucratic, democratic administrative mechanism will be
unable to solve.
The dam was not flattened so Engineer Semenza, if he were
still alive, would be innocent, looking at it from his
sector's point of view.
But the problem was the stability of the valley sides after
they suddenly received a hydraulic pressure of 26 atmospheres.
There was no alluvium at the bottom? What kind of excuse is
that? The liquid flowed fast through the gap and thus did not
deposit but eroded, creating over the centuries the conditions
the topographers described to poor Semenza. Thus the side was
friable, certainly permeable, and underneath the massive
pressure on the strata that could yield caused Toc to slide.
The following reservoirs, which could have provided an
empirical test result, took place without being tested and
without the order of the omnipotent state.
The dam was too High. The law on this matter must be amended
to state a legal maximum, let us say under 100 metres. But
then the return on the operation would fall below the costs.
Horror! The monopoly would not lose out, but only the
consumption pattern of those who depend on it, the same being
the case if the state were to act directly.
Reformism, not only in Italy, flies this flag: the law
passed, find the loophole.
An old engineer who could understand geology, topography and
building mechanics since he had an old fashioned degree said
that the dam could collapse now. Behind it there is no longer
water, but a mixed deposit of water and earth (mud and slime)
which, with its higher specific weight, could exercise a
greater thrust. Here there are no models that hold good! The
case is too indeterminate and even the computers come up with
nothing.
The Vajont basin was cut in two by the huge landslide with a
volume higher than that of the water that it contained, a hill
standing 100 metres above the water level.
But the smaller lake remaining next to the dam can generate
the pressure indicated by the aforementioned engineer. It all
depends on the height, that is the total, and the density of
the mud which will be decanted.
The basin must be emptied, but not by blasting the dam with
cannon-fire, but instead by installing syphons over it to
replace the devices destroyed by the disaster and abandoning
the potential energy which the turbine, if working. could have
exploited.
We cannot believe that the Ministry of Public Works could
have thought that the wall would remain in place to support
(?) an Alpine lake.
That sewer of death is no Alpine lake. The lakes formed
during the glaciation between very deep indestructible rock
walls and with a modest dam of natural morainic hills. They
have been tested by Mother Nature over millions of years, not
by a Technical Commission!
Man certainly will win against nature. And will do so thanks
to a science, a technology, an administration that will not be
rented out to anyone.
Before bending nature to our ends, we will have had to have
bent the sinister social forces which enslave us more than
millions of cubic meters of grave stones and which condemn the
replies of today's experts to great rewards and grasping
profits. We must dam the floods not of water and earth, but of
filthy lucre.
Footnotes
1 In 1917, the Italian army was forced back to the Piave
river after the front broke at Caporetto (now Kobarid) on the
Isonzo (now Soca). In the Third War of Independence, the
Italians, having previously made an alliance with Prussia
against Austria (8.4.1866), lost both on land (Custoza) and by
sea (Lissa). Prussia, however, prevailed, and the good offices
of Napoleon III assured Italy of Venetia all the same. The
Adige and Mincio are two rivers on the Po plain.
2 In fact "The names of rivers, lakes and mountains are
generally masculine. (...) Exceptions are, however, frequent
due to old reasons, thus la (fem.) Piave (and in modern and
local use) il (masc.) Piave." Alfredo Fansini Gramnatica
italiana (Palermo, 1982 (1933)) pp. 34-5.
3 Literally "bad step".
4 In Italian orrido, which means both gorge and horrible,
fearful etc..
