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ACCIDENT

Italian man crushed to death by falling cheese wheels

An Italian man has been crushed to death under thousands of vast wheels of Grana Padano hard cheese, weighing around 40 kilograms each, emergency services said on Monday.

Published: 7 August 2023 14:22 CEST
Italian man crushed to death by falling cheese wheels
A file photo shows broken shelves at a cheese factory in nortern Italy. AFP PHOTO / GIUSEPPE CACACE (Photo by GIUSEPPE CACACE / AFP)

Giacomo Chiapparini, 74, was buried under the cheeses when a top shelf broke in his warehouse in the northern Lombardy region on Sunday, creating a domino effect which brought down thousands of wheels, firefighter Antonio Dusi from Bergamo told AFP.

Rescuers “had to move the cheeses and the shelves by hand,” Dusi said, adding that it “took about 12 hours” to finally find Chiapparini.

The warehouse, located in the small town of Romano di Lombardia near Bergamo, contained a total of 25,000 wheels of Grana Padano, a popular Italian hard cheese.

Chiapparini had reportedly been checking on the ripening wheels, which were stored on metal shelves, the highest of which stood at 10 metres.

Police on Monday were reconstructing events which led up to the accident, according to Italian news reports.

Chiapparini’s company had been producing Grano Padano since 2006.

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ACCIDENT

Rescuers seek four missing after deadly Italy power plant blast

An explosion at an Italian hydroelectric power plant near Bologna on Tuesday afternoon killed at least three people and left four missing, officials said.

Published: 10 April 2024 12:55 CEST
Rescuers seek four missing after deadly Italy power plant blast

Rescuers on Wednesday continued to search for four workers still missing after an explosion at a hydroelectric plant in Italy, which has already left three confirmed dead.

“The toll is four missing and three dead,” a fire service spokesman told AFP, revising downwards a toll of four deaths given by local authorities on Tuesday evening.

But there are fears the death toll will rise, amid difficult searches at the Bargi hydroelectric plant run by Enel Green Power on Lake Suviana, near Bologna.

Searches are ongoing, with authorities calling the rescue operation complex as water continues to enter the plant.

The explosion of a turbine, whose cause has not yet been determined, occurred on the eighth floor below the water level, said Bologna’s prefect Attilio Visconti.

“On the ninth floor there was flooding due to a turbine cooling pipe” that brought in several metres of water, Visconti told reporters outside the plant.

A fire service spokesman, Luca Cari, told the ANSA news agency that rescuers “are not working with much hope of finding the missing (people) alive”.

Still, the department’s regional director Francesco Notaro told reporters that workers “maybe found shelter somewhere else” within the large space following the blast.

Firefighters working at the site of an explosion at a hydroelectric power plant on Lake Suviana in central Italy, near Bologna. (Photo by Vigili del Fuoco / AFP)

Five people were injured, according to the AGI news agency, which named the dead as three men aged 73, 45 and 35.

Enel Green Power, the renewables unit of energy giant Enel that operates the plant, offered its “deepest condolences” to the victims and their families following what it called a “serious accident”.

On Wednesday, it said that “efficiency works” had been underway at the time, the contracts for which had been awarded in 2022 to three main companies, Siemens, ABB and Voith.

“From what has been reconstructed, the testing of the first-generation group had already been completed in the past days and, at the time the accident occurred, the testing of the second group was underway,” the statement said.

“The company expresses its gratitude to the relevant authorities that are working tirelessly on rescue operations, to whom it is providing maximum support.”

It previously said the dam basin of the plant had not been damaged in the accident and that there had been no impact on local or national energy supplies.

The mayor of the nearby town of Camugnano, Marco Masinara, called the explosion a “terrible workplace accident” that affected the “entire community”.

“It seems there was a floor slab collapse and rescue is difficult as a lot of water entered inside the eighth basement floor,” he said late on Tuesday.

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