Oil spill made in Italy

by Eleonora Anello

Although inexplicably held out of the media stage, another coast was ruined and irreparably soiled by fuel oil. This time it was in Sardinia, in the 18 km of beaches ranging from Fiume Santo to Marritza. January 11th, 2011, in wonderful areas, attractive for thousands of tourists, it is estimated to have been dumped about 18,000 gallons of oil from the Esmeralda tanker during a pumping operation of power plants operated by the German multinational E.On.

The front-page news was not taken into account, but the inhabitants of those areas are rebelling. The latest striking initiative of a counter-campaign game from the bottom, and undertaken after a petition, the formation of various committees and the willingness to become involved in the cleaning, was "Black fish on Platamona Beach”. Created by the ex-Q artists and by the circle of the Rifondazione Comunista Utalabì, was staged on Sunday 16, building on the disfigured sand (Third comb Platamona) a whale. The shape of the dying whale was made with several plastic bags containing the pollutant landed on the coast and displayed outside in spectacular way and attractive to the media's disappointment and protest.

«We wanted to express our anger - explained the organizers to the Nuova Sardegna, a local journal - against this ecological damage ... The whale is not only the symbol of the fish swept away by the oil spill, but more generally of an entire ecosystem severely affected by a inexcusable negligence of the multinational company E.On».

The action was preceded by another abnormal event. Last week, in fact, always on the initiative of the Ex-Q artists, in the streets of Sassari were hung cardboard blacks fish, symbol of the fish deaths and signal of the presence of the Sardinian people.

Meanwhile, from the various meetings that are being treated and from the numerous committees established themselves, the impression is that everything will be merged into a single group that will be a civil party in the trial of those responsible for the environmental disaster.
But the story is always the same. As happened to the Gulf of Mexico, the guilty company looks quiet, minimizes the size and severity of the disaster, makes statements of fact and tries to fix sending workers cleaning the shoreline that has been affected. The big difference is that the U.S.A government has immediately moved, has maintained a hard line against the British Petroleum while in Italy there is silence.

At the moment the «unexpected mechanical failure in the drain line of the collector hoses placed in the dock», as E.On says, is extending to the Golfo dell’Asinara (a protected area), the committees promise to follow and document the events, especially involving the people, in the complicity and indifference of the institutions and the Italian media, we add with regret.