A system of moveable walls, called Moses, protects Venice from colossal high tides that are worsening with climate change. But they’re also destroying the marshes that keep the lagoon alive
The cataclysmic flood of November 12, 2019, washed unremarkably into Venice, Italy’s Piazza San Marco around 6 a.m. Two hours later, the rising waters began to tail off at about three feet above normal sea level, leaving 90 percent of the city untouched. Venetians breathed a collective sigh of relief. It was just another mildly unpleasantThe calm lasted until 4 p.m., just before night fell.
That has prompted Venetian officials to spend billions on a series of moveable walls to block high waters from the city. Calledin Italian, Moses in English, the system is in use and seems to be working. In effect, Moses temporarily divorces La Serenissima from the sea, closing off the entire Venetian Lagoon from menacing tides in the turbulent northern Adriatic Sea.
The functional heart of the project is a battery of four gigantic surge barriers that span three inlets to the lagoon from the Adriatic Sea. The two largest barriers, comprised respectively of 21 and 20 steel gates, are separated by a control center on an artificial island and stretch a combined half mile across the Lido inlet, just east of the main islands of urban Venice. Each is outfitted with a lock that allows small vessels to leave or enter the lagoon when the barrier is raised.
The Moses barriers were tested on the Lido inlet gate in 2019. Under normal tidal conditions, the gates are full of water and rest in their housing structures. When a high tide is forecast, compressed air is introduced into the gates to empty them, and they rise, stopping the tide from entering the lagoon. This natural salt marsh around the Venetian Lagoon has irregularly shaped banks and serpentine internal channels, essential for absorbing high tides.
Finotello, fellow hydraulic engineer Davide Tognin, and team leader Andrea D’Alpoas, an environmental engineer and leading authority on the lagoon, provide me with background, while Ghinassi inserts a long, T-handled cylindrical tool into the spongy ground. The cross-disciplinary mixture of experts is deliberate, D’Alpoas explains. “Eliminating the walls between pure science and engineering brings diverse perspectives into our work—and better results.”Please be respectful of copyright.
The industrial facilities extracted immense amounts of groundwater from compressed sediment under the lagoon, causing Venice to subside 4.5 inches in the 20th century, at the same time Adriatic sea levels rose by four inches. Although the Italian government closed most of the wells in 1970, the subsidence is irreversible and slowly increasing.
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