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'Moses project' to secure future of Venice


Owlscrying

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It sounds like something only a Bond villain could dream up: a fiendishly clever but astronomically expensive project to turn back the tide with giant steel gates bolted to the sea floor.

The Moses project, however, is reality, not fantasy, and its purpose is to solve the 1,000- year-old problem of how to safeguard the irreplaceable art and architecture of Venice, which appeared so under threat in last week's "acqua alta".

Art and architecture remained intact after Monday's floods, the fourth most severe rise in water levels since records began in 1872, but Venetians were split over whether the Moses scheme could have prevented the "deluge".

It entails the construction of 78 giant steel gates across the three inlets through which water from the Adriatic surges into Venice's lagoon. The 300-tonne hinged panels, 92ft wide and 65ft high, will be fixed to massive concrete bases dug into the sea bed. They will be raised whenever a dangerously high tide is predicted. Compressed air will be pumped into the hollow panels, forcing them to rise up on their hinges, forming a barrier to the incoming waves.

Moses – "Mose" in Italian – is both an allusion to the Old Testament story of how Moses parted the waves of the Red Sea during the Israelite exodus from Egypt and a neat acronym for the project's name, Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico.

It is not just rising sea levels with which Venice has to contend. The city is sinking as a result of subsidence caused by decades of groundwater extraction for agriculture and industry on the mainland, and offshore drilling for methane gas. This combination means that Venice has effectively sunk 23cm in the last century.

For 1,000 years "La Serenissima', as the Venetian Republic was known, used military force to carve out one of the world's most successful trading empires. With the Moses project, it is embarking on a battle against its greatest enemy: the sea.

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All Sounds great in Theory upon the engineering stages all the way to the assembly of and it may work, however these Huge Steel Plates are ran by Hydraulics and Compressors and are Mechanical so in Scenario what happens when let’s say just one plates hydraulics fail and the or the Compressors fail and the Plate doesn’t swing up or rise up? It becomes the Week Link and the Town of Venice Italy Floods...

Pavot B)

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