Venice flood project to be ready in 2020

ROME－The ambitious plan to protect the Italian canal city of Venice from severe flooding went through its first dry run this week and had good early reviews.

Venice, on Italy's northeastern coastline, was battered by record flooding in November. Waters rose 1.87 meters above normal, leaving two people dead and causing more than 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) in property damage, including harm to some of the city's cultural riches.

Flood risks are not new to Venice, which is made up of 118 small islands divided by canals and lagoons.

Starting in 2003, the Italian government began the development of a complex set of gates aimed at keeping water levels from rising too high in the city. But the 5.5-billion euro project, called MOSE－an acronym for Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico (Italian for Electromechanical Experimental Module)－was not yet ready to reduce the impact of last year's flood.

Based on the first full-scale test of MOSE this week, the project will be ready soon. The test moved 20 of the 78 water gates designed to block water level rise at four key junctures.

"If an emergency presents itself again, we will be able to raise the barriers and save the city from the worst damage," Italian Minister of Transport and Infrastructure Paola De Micheli told reporters on Monday.

Plagued by delays

Over its 17-year history, the MOSE project has been plagued by delays. Its original completion date was in 2016. But according to Monica Ambrosini, a senior official with the Venezia Nuova Consortium, which oversees the MOSE project, if rounds of tests go according to plan, it should be fully operational sometime between June and October this year－well ahead of the latest scheduled deadline at the end of next year.

"The gates are all in place," Ambrosini said."The only thing we lack now is the mechanisms used to raise and lower the gates. They'll be ready soon."

That was not the case on Nov 12, when flooding with the highest water levels in 50 years and the second-highest recorded hit the city. Some of the gates were operational, but Ambrosini said that raising just some of the gates would have made the problem worse.

"Ultimately, if some were raised, the water level would have ended up the same but the flow of water through the inlets where the barriers were not raised would have sped up," she said.

According to Giuseppe Passoni, a professor of environmental and land plan engineering at the Politecnico University in Milan, MOSE should solve most of the flood-related problems Venice could face. MOSE's architects say the gates should be able to withstand water level rises of as high as 3 meters, well above the all-time record of 1.94 meters of water level rise recorded in 1966.

"Once MOSE is fully operational, it will only be necessary to properly maintain it, and make sure there are no secondary problems," Passoni said.

Another challenge, the professor said, will be to make sure the gates are not raised too often, or if they are, enough oxygen is pumped into the Venice lagoon to make sure it can still support fish and plant life.

"If the lagoon were walled off for good it would quickly become stagnant because of a lack of oxygen in the water," Passoni said.