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NAPLES

‘We were lucky’: Passengers escape after giant sinkhole swallows cars in Naples

A chasm opened up in a road in Naples' Vomero district early on Wednesday, swallowing two cars with people inside.

Published: 21 February 2024 12:09 CET
Naples' Castel Sant'Elmo sits on the city's Vomero district on the top of a hill.
Naples' Castel Sant'Elmo sits in the city's Vomero district on top of a hill. Photo by GABRIEL BOUYS / AFP)

Video footage published to social media on Wednesday morning showed scenes of panic as passengers escaped from the cars under a torrent of water.

The vehicles’ occupants were rescued and no one was injured in the incident, which was thought to have been caused by a water leak.

“We were arriving from Via Bonito when, turning towards Via Morghen, the earth beneath us gave way. We suddenly found ourselves sunk underground,” local councillor Giulio Delle Donne, who was in one of the cars, told the news site Fanpage.

“We were lucky because at that moment there was an Italian army patrol in the area. The soldiers pulled us out of the hole with their arms,” he said.

“Along with the road, a tree and a lamppost collapsed, fortunately seconds after we got out of the passenger compartment. A few more moments and it would have been potentially fatal.”

Naples city council said initial checks appeared to show that the sewer had collapsed, adding in a tweet that a tweet that local police, firemen, and workers from the city’s water company were on the scene.

Significant amounts of water leaked onto Via Kerbaker, below the site of the collapse, where terraces and apartments were flooded.

“The water supply pipeline has been closed and the water supply has therefore been interrupted in the San Martino area and from Piazza Vanvitelli upwards,” the council said in a statement.

The nearby Salesiani high school was closed as a precautionary measure, and it’s expected that a building next to the sinkhole on Via Morghen will be evacuated while workers fix the problem.

This is far from the first time a sinkhole has opened in Naples – just last month, Via Manzoni was closed after the collapse of another sewage pipe opened up a hole in the road.

Questioned by journalists on Wednesday, Mayor Gaetano Manfredi blamed the problem on a lack of regular maintenance carried out in the past.

“We have a situation at the sewer system that has not had maintenance for many, many years,” he said.

“We are putting in place monitoring projects, to do preventive maintenance. We’re also doing major cleanup work.”

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STATISTICS

Are Italy’s workplaces more dangerous than elsewhere in Europe?

Following reports of yet another deadly workplace accident in Italy, does the country really perform worse than its European neighbours when it comes to worker safety?

Published: 8 May 2024 10:48 CEST
Are Italy’s workplaces more dangerous than elsewhere in Europe?

On Monday, five workers maintenance workers were killed on the island of Sicily after inhaling poisonous fumes at a sewage treatment plant.

This latest tragedy follows the high-profile deaths of five workers at a Florence construction site in February, and the deaths of seven workers in an explosion at a hydroelectric plant outside Bologna in April.

The frequency with which these stories appear in the headlines can make it seem like there’s a major workplace incident every other week in Italy.

The issue even made it into this year’s Sanremo music festival with Paolo Jannacci and Stefano Massini’s performance of L’Uomo nel lampo (‘The man in the flash’), introduced by host Amadeus with a sombre reflection on the number of people killed on the job in Italy every day (around three).

READ ALSO: Rome square filled with coffins in protest over Italy’s workplace deaths

But does Italy really perform significantly worse than the rest of Europe when it comes to worker protections, or does it just sometimes feel that way?

According to data from the European Commission’s statistics office, Eurostat, in 2021 (the most recent year for which data is available) Italy had the eighth highest number of fatalities out of the 27 EU countries, with 2.66 deaths per 100,000 workers – worse than Spain and Portugal, but better than France and Austria.

The worst three countries for worker deaths were Latvia, with 4.29 deaths per 100,000, followed by Lithuania (3.75) and Malta (3.34); while the three least-fatal countries for workers were Finland (0.75), Greece (0.58) and Holland (0.33).

Workplace deaths in Europe in 2021. Source: Eurostat

If you look at Eurostat’s standardised incidence rates – which adjust for the fact that domestic economies rely to a greater or lesser extent on different industries that carry different levels of worker risk – Italy remains in eighth place, but performs slightly worse, with more than 3 deaths per 100,000.

Data from Italy’s state-run Workers Compensation Authority, INAIL, shows that worker deaths in Italy dropped from more than ten per day in the early 1960’s to around one third that number in the early 90’s, but haven’t significantly declined since then.

INAIL figures also show that 191 people died at work in the first quarter of 2024 – no worse than any time in the past decade, when the numbers have consistently hovered around 200.

That’s not good enough for workers’ rights groups, who say those in power are failing to enforce adequate worker safety protections.

The Palermo chapter of workers union CGIL staged a general strike and a protest outside the city’s prefecture on Tuesday, following a national protest calling for better worker safety protections last month.

Cardboard coffins fill Rome’s Piazza del Popolo on March 19th in a protest drawing attention to the number of deaths at work in Italy. Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP.

“A business model based on contracts, subcontracts and precariousness is a model that kills,” CGIL general secretary Maurizio Landini told reporters.

Unions are calling for “continuous and comprehensive inspections, supervision of the contracting system, and more attention to the training of workers.”

Initial reports showed that none of the workers who died on Monday were wearing personal protective equipment. One was retired, and two were not technically qualified to carry out the works.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella described the incident as “yet another unacceptable workplace massacre,” adding that he hoped that “full light will be shed” on the causes of the accident.

In a 2023 report, INAIL’s supervisory board noted that the authority had a significant budget surplus, but that it couldn’t be used for accident prevention because current regulations ringfence the funds for compensation payouts.

The authority’s exclusive focus on building up financial reserves for insurance claims while neglecting to fund worker safety initiatives is counter-productive, the board wrote, “perpetuating a vicious circle that diverts resources needed for prevention by pouring them into the Treasury in excess of real needs.”

Instead of simply building up reserves, they argue, the institute should focus its efforts on “decisive intervention” to reduce workplace accidents, “including through the funding of prevention initiatives”.

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