http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/28/us-italy-ilva-cleanup-idUSBRE8AR0DP20121128
and.......
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/nov/29/tornado-italian-steel-plant-video
http://www.euronews.com/2012/11/28/tornado-smashes-into-troubled-italian-steel-plant/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUCFb7IoVM0
( Guess God spoke regarding ILVA.... )
Kinda strange that happened just a couple of days after the big workers action , right ?
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/11/27/274914/1000s-of-italian-workers-storm-steel-unit/
On Monday, an Italian court ruled to confiscate the factory's cold rolling facility that produces finished steel plates, strips, and pipes, Reuters reported.
The court linked a high rate of deaths in the area to pollution from the ILVA steel factory. On Tuesday, several thousand workers forced their way into factory and staged a sit-in protest there.
Twenty thousand jobs are at stake at the factory, which is in a region of high unemployment and economic stagnation.
“There are those who have worked here for 30 years who would never have imagined such a dramatic evolution of the situation," said a union official. "There is anarchy in Taranto."
According to the court, the company could reopen the ILVA plant after cutting emissions and reducing the environmental waste.
Environment Minister Corrado Clini said the government should clean the plant before a meeting with the steel factory's management on Thursday, when unions plan to hold anti-government demonstrations in Rome.
"We are working to resolve this situation quickly, and I think we will have a solution ready for Thursday," Clini said, when Monti, his key ministers, union leaders and the management will meet in Rome.
and.....
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/european-business/italy-races-to-save-ilva-steel-plant-as-workers-storm-factory/article5734802/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/17/italy-ilva-steelworks-cancer-pollution
(Reuters) - A violent storm hit the troubled ILVAsteel plant in southern Italy, injuring dozens and adding to disruption at the huge site, which is already caught in a widening pollution scandal that could cost billions.
The tornado rolled off the sea and hit the port city of Taranto on Wednesday, bringing down a chimney stack and damaging a warehouse and lighthouse at the factory's docks, the company said in a statement.
Around 20 workers were injured out of a total of 38 people hurt in Taranto and divers searched for a worker who was unaccounted for after a dockside crane collapsed. Three others on the crane were rescued.
The sudden storm, which television pictures showed filling the sky with a dark grey swirl of cloud that ripped across the harbor, was the latest blow to ILVA, which has become one of the most pressing issues confronting the government of Prime Minister Mario Monti.
Europe's largest steel plant had already stopped production and faces the threat of permanent closure after magistrates this week seized semi-finished material and steel in a corruption investigation linked to the environmental scandal.
The particle-laden fumes and airborne waste pumped out by the plant are blamed for abnormally high levels of cancer and respiratory diseases in the region. The company denies its operations are responsible.
Environment Minister Corrado Clini insisted on Wednesday that the government would save the plant, which employs some 20,000 people in a region of high unemployment, saying its closure would have devastating effects on the wider economy.
"Risking industrial production in the steel sector means creating a domino effect in economic and social terms," he told parliament in a speech.
CLOSURES
Antonio Gozzi, the head of Italy's steel industry association Federacciai, said permanent closure would force companies to buy steel from abroad, costing the rest of Italian industry up to 5 billion euros ($6.5 billion) and sending a number of companies to the wall.
"The government must be aware of the importance of steel for Italian industry. The manufacturing sector lives because it can get steel in Italy. If it has to import, it will lose its competitive edge," he said.
Clini said cabinet would pass legislation to force a clean-up of the plant, where employs some 12,000 people and keeps another 8,000 ancillary staff in work.
He said earlier that he thought a solution would be reached in time for a meeting with company management on Thursday. He said he expects the cabinet to approve a decree putting previously agreed clean-up measures into law.
"We are trying to implement what we have already decided," Clini told Canale 5 television, a day before a meeting between Prime Minister Mario Monti, unions and company management to resolve the standoff.
The two-year, 3 billion euro clean-up program agreed last month to secure environmental clearance for the plant should be completed without interference, Clini said. He has been battling to save the plant, putting him at odds with Taranto prosecutors.
"Cleaning up the site, laying down how the clean-up has to be carried out and how the site has to be managed to ensure that environmental and health protection standards are met are up to the government," he said. "It's not up to magistrates."
Magistrates placed the plant's blast furnaces under special administration in July. The crisis heightened when they seized the plant's output earlier this week. That led ILVA to shut down the cold-rolling section that transforms raw steel into plates and tubes.
ILVA produced 8.5 million metric tons of steel in 2011, nearly 30 percent of Italy's total output, and concern has grown about the effect of a shutdown on the rest of Italian manufacturing. Workers at an ILVA processing plant near Genoa in northern Italy say the plant will last just four days without steel from the southern plant.
Judges have also ordered the arrest of seven people, including the chairman of the company which controls ILVA, on suspicion that they bribed officials to cover up the scale of the health and environmental damage.
and.......
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/nov/29/tornado-italian-steel-plant-video
http://www.euronews.com/2012/11/28/tornado-smashes-into-troubled-italian-steel-plant/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUCFb7IoVM0
( Guess God spoke regarding ILVA.... )
Kinda strange that happened just a couple of days after the big workers action , right ?
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/11/27/274914/1000s-of-italian-workers-storm-steel-unit/
1000s of Italian workers storm Europe’s biggest steel plant
Workers of the ILVA steel plant stand in front of the factory during a protest in Taranto on November 27, 2012.
Tue Nov 27, 2012 11:1PM GMT
0
Thousands of Italian workers have stormed Europe’s biggest steel plant, ILVA, which faces a closure over charges of creating an environmental disaster.
On Monday, an Italian court ruled to confiscate the factory's cold rolling facility that produces finished steel plates, strips, and pipes, Reuters reported.
The court linked a high rate of deaths in the area to pollution from the ILVA steel factory. On Tuesday, several thousand workers forced their way into factory and staged a sit-in protest there.
Twenty thousand jobs are at stake at the factory, which is in a region of high unemployment and economic stagnation.
“There are those who have worked here for 30 years who would never have imagined such a dramatic evolution of the situation," said a union official. "There is anarchy in Taranto."
Now the huge layoff remains in the hands of Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti who has been trying to pull the country out of economic turmoil since he assumed office in November 2011.
According to the court, the company could reopen the ILVA plant after cutting emissions and reducing the environmental waste.
Environment Minister Corrado Clini said the government should clean the plant before a meeting with the steel factory's management on Thursday, when unions plan to hold anti-government demonstrations in Rome.
"We are working to resolve this situation quickly, and I think we will have a solution ready for Thursday," Clini said, when Monti, his key ministers, union leaders and the management will meet in Rome.
and.....
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/european-business/italy-races-to-save-ilva-steel-plant-as-workers-storm-factory/article5734802/
Italy races to save ILVA steel plant as workers storm factory
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/17/italy-ilva-steelworks-cancer-pollution
Italian town fighting for its life over polluting Ilva steelworks
Owners under house arrest, shutdowns ordered – but plant has defenders despite soil contamination and sky-high cancer rates
Email
The Ilva steelworks in Taranto where layers of the black and red dust cover every pavement and lung cancer mortality rates are 30% above the Italian average. Photograph: Mario Laporta/AFP/Getty Images
In the neighbourhood over the fence from Italy's – and Europe's – biggest steelworks, Francesco Mastrocinque is poking his toe into the layer of black and red powder that covers every pavement and counting his friends who have died of cancer and respiratory illnesses.
"It's about one a month, but people round here try not to think about it," said the shopkeeper, as he looked up at the chimney towering over Taranto's Tamburi quarter – a dark, dusty corner of Puglia where residents are now forbidden by law from touching the soil.
The Ilva steelworks, owned by Italy's Riva family, employs 12,000 and breathes life into the depressed local economy, but has long been accused of killing off local people by belching into the air a mix of minerals, metals and carcinogenic dioxins – 8.8% of the total dioxins emitted in Europe, according to a 2005 study. More recent government figures put the cancer death rate in the area at 15% above the national average and lung cancer deaths at 30% higher. Prosecutors say emissions have killed 400 people in 13 years.
So few were surprised when a magistrate this month ordered the shutdown of the most polluting furnaces, described Ilva as "an environmental disaster" and placed members of the Riva family under house arrest, claiming they were "perfectly aware" of what they were dumping on Taranto. A former employee was also put under investigation for allegedly paying off a government inspector to tone down a report.
But what happened next was less expected. Unions went on strike to protest against the magistrate's decision, blocking roads with banners. "Dioxin levels have been reduced and emissions can be cut further with new technology, without stopping production," said Rocco Palombella, secretary general of the UILM union. He has worked alongside the 1,300C furnaces at Ilva for 36 years without, he says, falling ill.
The government then backed the unions, with the environment minister, Corrado Clini, saying it would take eight months for the furnaces to cool down, during which time Chinese competition would reap rewards. Bizarrely, Italy's health minister warned that losing your job was detrimental to your health.
Clini, who met local leaders in Taranto on Friday, promised cash to clean up Ilva. He also said health studies do not reflect emission cuts already made. "Clini is lying about this since the magistrate's report is based on studies concluded this year," said Angelo Bonelli, leader of the Green party in Italy. "We know that mothers in Taranto today have three times the allowed level of dioxins in their milk."
In a region known for baroque towns like Lecce and traditional Trullo cottages tucked into olive groves, Taranto is the exception. Its skyline is dominated by smoking chimneys and its old town is a half abandoned collection of bricked up and crumbling palazzi.
Farmers were put out of business when grazing was banned within 20km (12.4 miles) of Ilva and almost 3,000 livestock with excessive dioxin levels were slaughtered. Mussel cultivation, for which Taranto is renowned, is struggling after beds were moved away from the steelworks.
"There isn't a family in Tamburi without a sick or dead member thanks to Ilva," said Rosella Balestra, a local activist. "People ignored it for a long time but now, when I talk to them, tears often come. Slowly, a wall of self denial is coming down."
Despite initial suspicion among mothers, Balestra began warning children playing in the piazzas not to touch flower beds after she discovered the council had done little to publicise its ban on contact with the polluted soil.
Pollution is part of local life. Every day residents sweep their balconies clean of the red mineral dust blowing in from Ilva's mountainous deposits and the black soot from its chimneys, which regularly clog storm drains.
"The magistrates launched their inquiry here when politicians failed to do their duty, and now the politicians are attacking the magistrates for doing theirs," said Balestra.
According to Patrizio Mazza, a doctor, the dust is killing young and old. "I first noticed the increase when I treated a 10-year-old boy five years ago with throat cancer," he said. "It is no good reducing emissions now because any new emissions at all simply top up the saturated earth and water. The furnaces must be shut down."
A growing protest movement, which mounted a 2,000-strong march in Taranto on Friday, has found a champion in Cataldo Ranieri, a 42-year-old Ilva employee who initially backed management against the magistrates, blocking a road in protest in July. "A man came up to me that day and said, 'My wife needs to get through to do her chemotherapy.' That changed my life."
Mazza said rates of tumours among Ilva staff who were campaigning to keep the plant open was 10 times higher than the national average. "Workers there just wanted to think about their work, not illness," said Vincenzo Pignatelli, 60, who worked near the furnaces for 29 years and survived leukaemia after retiring in 2002. "Four colleagues in my group of about 100 died of leukaemia and I would see so many former colleagues during my trips to hospital it was like a works reunion."
Bonelli shrugged off the government's view that the local – and national – economy would suffer if Ilva closed its most polluting furnaces, saying: "Bilbao and Pittsburgh managed it thanks to investment, why not Taranto?"
In Tamburi, Francesco Mastrocinque watched as children kicked a football around on a dusty patch of earth, flouting the ban.
"The red mineral powder glitters in the gutters, but the black soot feels like fine sand when it gets into your mouth," he said. "Ilva have paid for improvements in the neighbourhood, like putting fountains in the cemetery, but they didn't clean the tombstones, which are slowly turning black and red."
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