Over Troubled Waters.(Brief Article)

In ancient times, sailors lived in fear of the violent and treacherous passage between Calabria on the Italian mainland and the island of Sicily. Homer wrote of a whirlpool that swallowed ships whole, and a six-headed monster lying in wait for sailors foolish enough to make the crossing. The concerns have changed, but the general sentiment hasn't. Nowadays, the road to Calabria's ferry dock is a notorious smugglers' route and is known for carjackings, road rage and murder. The ferryboats are decrepit. And the strait's fierce waters still on occasion swallow a ship or two.

Now the Italian government seems poised to leapfrog these troubles by building a gleaming new suspension bridge. At five kilometers, the Messina Strait Bridge would be a modern engineering marvel. Weighing in at 54,630 tons, the mammoth structure would span 3.3 kilometers of water, beating the two-kilometer record currently held by Japan's Akashi Kaikyo Bridge. It would also fulfill a campaign promise by Italy's ruling center-right coalition to empower the mezzogiorno, Italy's poorest region. Calabria has the highest unemployment rate in Italy, little industry and rampant organized crime. Across the strait, the Sicilian town of Messina has suffered centuries of plague, malaria, cholera and earthquakes. What better place than to push the frontiers of engineering?

The bridge's designers have been mindful of the region's propensity for disaster. The bridge will be built to withstand a magnitude-7.1 earthquake, and it will have aerodynamic "windbreak barriers" that will allow it to withstand gusts of more than 200 kilometers an hour. Two I- shaped steel towers, each 370 meters high, will rest on massive prism- shaped blocks of concrete set into the rocky shores. The roadway will hang from the towers by four 1.4-meter cables, each made up of 88 strands of galvanized steel. In case trucks carrying hazardous materials collide and leak, the roadways will be pitched at a 2 percent slope and equipped with gutters so runoff won't drain into the sea.

The government hopes that the bridge will trigger a tourism-fueled revival of the area. It's hard to see how things could be worse. Local ferries take only an hour, but passengers often stand in queues for hours. The road down to Villa San Giovanni, where the ferries depart from the mainland, is a lonely, crime-ridden stretch. To avoid it, many travelers prefer the 10-hour overnight ferry from Naples. The government would remedy this with extensive improvements to the existing highway, which would lead to the bridge's 12 ...