Venice asks other ports to help find solution to cruise ship problems

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The appeal to the ports of Barcelona, Amsterdam, Marseille, Dubrovnik, Zeebrugge, Hamburg, Palma and Málaga comes as Venice leaders clash with government officials over finding a solution to a problem that has long rankled Venetians.

Venice asks other ports to help find solution to cruise ship problems

Italian city’s port authority asks eight other port cities to ‘join forces’ to combat problem

Angela Giuffrida

Sat 3 Aug 2019 12.57 BST Last modified on Sat 3 Aug 2019 17.14 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/03/venice-asks-other-ports-to-help-find-solution-to-cruise-ship-problems

Venice’s port authority has called on Europe’s most popular cruise ship destinations to close ranks in tackling the dangers posed by massive vessels.

The appeal to the ports of Barcelona, Amsterdam, Marseille, Dubrovnik, Zeebrugge, Hamburg, Palma and Málaga comes as Venice leaders clash with government officials over finding a solution to a problem that has long rankled Venetians.

The issue returned to the spotlight after four people were injured when the 13-deck MSC Opera crashed into a wharf and tourist boat along the busy Giudecca canal in early June. Weeks later the 12-deck Costa Deliziosa narrowly missed colliding into a yacht during a storm. The incidents have revived protests against big ships and calls from residents to ban them from the Venice lagoon altogether.

Pino Musolino, the chairman of the North Adriatic Sea Port Authority, appealed to his eight counterparts to “join forces” in demanding cruise companies make their ships “compatible with our structures and the environment”.

“The cruise sector has been, and still is, a great source of income and a provider of jobs and innovations in our ports and our cities,” he wrote in a letter. “However, the growing size of vessels, their environmental impact on the areas surrounding the ports and the ‘burden’ that the increasing number of tourists are representing on the cities that are hosting our ports are creating a situation of conflict … the recent situation in Venice has demonstrated that the risk of creating real and unrecoverable damage is ever present.”

Musolino’s appeal comes before a meeting on Tuesday with Danilo Toninelli, the Italian transport minister, representatives from the Venice Passenger Terminal and security officials to discuss a plan to divert big ships from the Giudecca canal.

The most recent solution proposed by Toninelli is for a third of the ships that currently arrive at the Marittima terminal to dock at Fusina, a small port on mainland Venice. He previously suggested diverting the ships to Chioggia, a port south of Venice.

“Venice is an incomparable treasure chest of art and nature, a heritage that must be preserved by keeping together the needs of security, the environment, tourism and jobs,” he recently wrote on Facebook.

It has been noted that Luigi Brugnaro, the mayor of Venice, and Luca Zaia, president of the Veneto region, who were both involved in a committee set up by the previous government to resolve the dilemma, will be absent from Tuesday’s meeting.

Brugnaro has criticised Toninelli, a minister from the Five Star Movement, which often fights against major infrastructure projects, for not only rejecting a plan agreed by the former administration that would have closed off the canal to cruise ships, but for leaving him and Zaia out of discussions about alternative proposals.

The project agreed in 2017 foresaw vessels weighing more than 96,000 tonnes entering the lagoon via the Malamocco canal to reach the mainland area of Marghera, where a passenger terminal would be built. Medium-sized vessels would go past Marghera and take the longer route through the Vittorio Emanuele canal before reaching the Marittima terminal. But the project would involve dredging canals, raising concerns over the environmental impact.

“I don’t really have high expectations that any big decisions will be made on Tuesday, especially without the local administration’s involvement,” said Dominic Standish, a British academic and author of the book Venice in Environmental Peril? Myth and Reality.

“But Musolino’s move was interesting. I think he’s caught in the middle … the letter was obviously particularly aimed at the cruise ship companies, but in some ways it was a cry for help [to all parties]: ‘Can we find some way of negotiating?’”

Protesters against big ships oppose the solution backed by Brugnaro and support the Fusina option, albeit temporarily. But with their ultimate desire to have cruise ships completely banned unlikely to be met anytime soon, they are planning their next protest on 7 September, the final day of the Venice film festival.