by J. Delingpole, No. 14, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Venice is flooded – again – and the mayor Luigi Brugnaro is blaming climate change.
This has become the standard dog-ate-my-homework excuse for desperate politicians and administrators who want to dodge their responsibilities while simultaneously attracting media sympathy and aid money.
But it’s rubbish, of course. The real reason for Venice’s plight is in whichever idiot decided all those years ago to build the city on a series of swampy islands at the edge of a lagoon.
On the plus side, this helped the Venetians build a wealthy maritime empire and later to extract gazillions of euros from tourists who think it’s romantic being propelled in a funny looking boat down rancid, rat-infested canals by a man in a stripy shirt with a long stick. On the downside, Venice is slowly going the way of Atlantis.
There is nothing weird about Venice flooding at this time of year. From Autumn to Spring is the season known as ‘acqua alta’, when the tides in the Adriatic are higher than usual, so it’s not uncommon for attractions like Piazza San Marco to be inundated with water rather than the usual hapless travelers being fleeced for a 20 Euro cappuccino.
In 2003, Venice began building a flood barrier – known as Moses – which was supposed to put an end to all that.
But as is the way with Italian public works projects — in fact, all public works projects everywhere — it has run fearfully overbudget, become riddled with corruption, and taken much longer than originally planned.
According to Business Insider:
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