The Ships from Hell

Though the gondola is the boat most intimately associated with the city of Venice, many other boats ply the waters of La Serenissima. Some of them – the sàndolo, the caorlìna, the peòta – are propelled, as is the gondola, by oars. Others, the large transport boats that bring in the mineral water and washing machines, have motors, as do the ACTV vaporetti that take residents and tourists on long-established routes around the city. All of these boats, even the enormous – at least by normal Venetian standards – vaporetti serve the needs of the residents by moving them around their city and bringing to them the things that are nowadays necessary for the running of their lives. In 2002, the city of Venice reported that public transport made up less than 9% of the water traffic in the historic center of the city. By 2006-7, that number had grown to 13%. During the same years, the transport of merchandise went from 24.5% to 28%.

But. But. But there are now other boats to be seen in the city. Like some of the others, they are propelled by motors: unlike most of the others, they in no way serve the needs of the majority of the citizens of the city. These are the multi-decked cruise ships which – like the ravaging tribes that a thousand years ago drove the inhabitants of the area to flee in terror from their invasion – have come to Venice to endanger the lives of the natives and lay waste the city, though this time they do it with music playing from their decks.

In the face of the original invasion of the Huns and Lombards, brave Venetian leaders led their fellows to seek shelter from the approaching enemy in the marshes not far from the mainland and subsequently radiated out from the city they built in the midst of the pristine waters of the laguna to fight their way to the creation of an empire. The men who rule the city today, however, demonstrate significantly less far-sightedness in the face of an insidious invasion which puts the city at risk.

Caesar tells us that all Gaul is divided into three parts. Common sense tells us that all Venice is divided into two: those who are in favor of the cruise ships and those who hate them. In favor are those who stand to profit from the arrival of an extra few million tourists each year: everyone else in the city falls into the second category.

Those who argue in favor of continuing to permit the boats to block out the sight of the Basilica di San Marco from the other side of the canal, to pollute the air with their engines (about which more in a moment) to create waves that eat at the foundations of the buildings – in short, to hasten the destruction of the city and its residents – can present only financial profit as a motive. One recalls the famous remark attributed to an American officer during the Vietnam War: “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

The cruise ships, long a sore in the eyes of most residents, have been slipping in and out of the city for years, though it is only recently, as their effects on the welfare of the city and its residents have become more evident, that the infection been recognized as a full-blown disease. Various groups of citizens who are concerned about the damage caused by the cruise ships have published some numbers and information which non-Venetians might find interesting. Their research has discovered that 405 cruise ships docked in Venice in 2004. By 2010, there were 629, an increase of more than 50% in six years. The ships, however, like so many of their passengers, have grown much bigger, so the total number of passengers in those years went from 677,617 to 1,617,011. In 2011, in the single week of 23-30 July, 77 cruise ships passed in front of San Marco. The largest of these was 311 meters long (that’s six Olympic swimming pools, in case you were looking for a way to judge the length) and 48 meters wide. This boat displaced 134,352 cubic meters of water, and if you can figure out how many swimming pools that is, good for you. As any boat moves through the water, the force of its passage displaces the water, which is forced to the sides and, presumably, will bang against the first obstacle it encounters. How much force is exerted by one hundred and thirty-four thousand cubic meters of water, pushed, propelled, shoved aside in a narrow passage lined with embankments and houses on both sides? And what is the effect upon the embankments of the repeated force of that amount of moving water?

Could this explain why the windows of the houses along the embankment shake and why cracks appear in the walls of the buildings? Does this have anything to do with the fact that the embankment of the Giudecca had to be enforced with concrete some years ago? And what about the sediment in this canal, reported in many scientific analyses to be filled with dioxin and heavy metals? How healthy for the people living near that water and the fish that swim in that water (brave survivors that they are, dear little things) to have the propellers of these behemoths stir up the sediment? Here it should be noted that these same canals were the places where many Venetians still living today learned to swim and went fishing. Who would risk that now?

Then there is the fuel burned by these ships. It has been repeatedly cited in Il Gazzettino, that journalistic Bible of the city, that the motors of each of these cruise ships, which must keep running 24 hours a day to produce the electricity which the city is not equipped to provide to the port, is the equivalent, in terms of pollution, of having the motors of 14,000 cars left running all day long. On some days there are five of these monsters moored at San Basilio. My math tells me that I now breathe the air of a city where, during much of the year, 70,000 cars are parked, their motors running all day long, a kilometer from my home. More preoccupying, a 2007 study stated that the bunker fuel used by many ships has 2,000 times the sulfur content of the usual diesel fuel used by cars and buses, but I’d prefer not to calculate how many cars that means. Nowhere have I read which type is used by the cruise ships that dock in Venice, though I have read many articles about the breaking of anti-pollution laws by many cruise ship lines. Thus I do not know which burning fuel fills the air with its smell during much of the summer. Tourists used to complain that the stagnant water of the canals created an unpleasant smell during part of the year, yet nowhere was it ever said that the smell was highly toxic, as high-sulfur fumes have been determined to be.

There is little scientific doubt about the correlation between air pollution and lung cancer: the WHO has calculated just how much particulate matter in the air will cause mortality to increase, and by what percentage. Further, they have published a study reporting that, until now, the link between diesel fuel and lung cancer has been underestimated. Even the Chinese are worried, for God’s sake. Venetians, however, need not concern themselves with such things because the health service of Venice has not rendered the relevant statistical studies of mortality public since 2002, when it projected numbers of deaths up until 2009. That report, however, suggested that Venice is the Italian city with the highest incidence of lung cancer. Though there is no proof that the cruise ships are the cause, there is no proof that they are not.

Once the ships clear their moorings and move out to the open waters of the Adriatic, they are subject to the muddle of laws regarding what can and cannot be dumped into the waters in which cruise ships sail or burned and let free in the air around them. They are meant to control the dumping of substances such as dry cleaning fluids, paint, solvents, heavy metals, batteries, to make no mention of human waste. Some laws exist, as well, about what can and what cannot be burned, and where, in the incinerators of cruise ships, yet one researcher states that cruise ships incinerate hazardous waste, oil, oily sludge, sewage sludge, medical and bio-hazardous waste, outdated pharmaceuticals, as well as plastics, paper, metal, and glass.

In return for this damage, the 58,000 residents of the city are offered the promise of economic reward: the Port Authority will earn more docking fees, and shops in a city that already suffocates under the presence of millions of tourists will have a few million more. Passengers on cruise ships sleep and can eat on their boats, so hotels and restaurants are unlikely to share in the spoils.

Citizens and residents protest, organize committees, sign petitions, stand at the side of the Canale della Giudecca and hold up signs telling the tourists their cruise ships are not wanted. The local government gives a benign smile, and more and more cruise ships receive permission to sail past, dwarfing the cupolas of the Basilica. One looks out into the Bacino or into the even more narrow waters of the Canale della Giudecca, and the ghost image of the Costa Concordia, still lying like a dead whale in the waters off the Isola del Giglio, flashes into memory, as does the claim of an employee of the White Star Line’s Titanic that “not even God himself could sink this ship.” The happy tourists on the decks wave back at the friendly natives, and all of those hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of displaced water continue to slide across to the rivas on both sides of the canal to give the city the Kiss of Death.