Il racconto del Vajont

4 ideas

1. Monte Toc falls into the Vajont

   On 9 October 1963, about 270 million cubic metres of Monte Toc slid into the reservoir behind the Vajont dam, then one of the tallest arch dams in the world. The wave overtopped the dam, which itself survived almost intact, and swept down the Piave valley, destroying Longarone and nearby villages and killing roughly 1,900-2,000 people in minutes. The mountain's instability had been known for years: a smaller slide occurred in 1960, and a perimeter crack on the mountainside was being monitored.

2. The disaster was foreseen, not natural

   Paolini argues that Vajont was not a natural catastrophe but a predictable outcome that the operator SADE, its consultants and state supervisors had documented and chose to manage rather than prevent. Local residents and the journalist Tina Merlin publicly warned that the mountain would come down, and Merlin was prosecuted for spreading false and alarming news. Official language of 'fatality' and 'act of nature' then functioned to convert responsibility into misfortune.

3. Trying to steer a landslide

   Instead of abandoning the reservoir, engineers tried to control the slide by raising and lowering the water level, hoping to make the mountain settle slowly into the lake at a manageable speed. They relied on hydraulic model tests that suggested the wave would be safe below a certain level. Meanwhile, the pressure to complete the reservoir's commissioning tests before the hydroelectric sector was nationalized into ENEL kept the level rising despite accelerating movement. A known hazard was redefined as an operational variable, which let the project continue while the risk grew.

4. Storytelling as belated civic reckoning

   Paolini treats a single performer telling the story in plain, dialect-inflected speech, eventually broadcast live from the dam in 1997, as a way to break decades of national silence that court records and reports had not broken. The monologue works by making technical and legal facts comprehensible and personal, so the audience relives the chain of decisions rather than just the outcome. On this view, a society only learns from a disaster once the story is told in a form ordinary people will actually listen to.

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