Ex Ilva, the spotlight of the Prosecutor's Office on the maintenance of Blast Furnace 1: «Critical issues have emerged»

TARANTO - Blast Furnace 1 of the former Ilva in Taranto has shown "critical issues in the technical production cycle and in maintenance interventions". This is the summary of the reasons why the public prosecutor Francesco Ciardo validated the evidentiary seizure of the entire plant in which last May 7 a fire broke out that threatened to cause a massacre: a real explosion that in the space of a few seconds transformed the department into an inferno of flames and smoke in which only by a miracle the workers were not involved. A "major incident" according to the prosecutor's office that has entered the general manager Maurizio Saitta, the director of the plant, Benedetto Valli, and the director of the blast furnace area, Arcangelo De Biasi, in the register of suspects. The charges are of fire, dangerous throwing of objects and, only for Valli, violation of the rules imposed by the "Seveso directive".

In the eight pages that make up the validation decree notified in recent days, the prosecutor Ciardo explained that, at the moment, what emerges with "extreme clarity is the absence of external events (attributable to human activity or otherwise) capable of severing the causal link between the event and the general conditions of the Afo1 plant". In simple terms, this means that there were no errors by the personnel on duty during the production phases and therefore the cause of the "vast proportions" fire that required 6 hours of firefighter activity to put out, can be traced back to the conditions in which the blast furnace is found.

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