Analysis
A misplaced nail is all it takes to ruin the trains under Salvini’s watch
After a rail worker’s accident led to massive delays, Salvini asked for the ‘name, surname and tax code of the person’ who made the error. Opposition parties: ‘Salvini wants the name and surname of the person responsible? He should put down his own.’
After a catastrophic summer, autumn started off even worse. Taking a train in Italy is not just extremely expensive, but has become a game of chance. “For want of a nail…” goes the rhyme, and all it took was a nail driven into a cable at 3 a.m. to shut down rail traffic for a whole day in the famed second-largest manufacturing powerhouse of Europe, whose output has been falling for 18 consecutive months.
The Italy that the right-wingers in power keep waxing lyrical about – a barnacle on the underside of the G7 club, which can at least offer them a pleasant outing among Apulian farms – had been brought to its knees by 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday. More than 100 trains were canceled, and the others had delays of up to 255 minutes. A now-legendary train that left from Viterbo took 5 hours to arrive in Rome. And the nine minutes it takes to go from Roma Termini to Roma Tiburtina experienced something akin to relativistic time dilation, turning into hours.
And whose fault was it for the nail driven through a cable that tumbled the house of cards of the billions of euros invested in rail infrastructure? It was a worker for a “private company,” claimed Matteo Salvini, who among other duties also serves as Transport Minister, in which role he reached the sublime heights of the grotesque on Wednesday.
“Guys,” said the Lega vice-premier, “I want the name, surname and tax code of the person who ruined the day of thousands of Italians from North to South who got stuck in place. Since the one who made the mistake must pay, I have asked to find out if anyone is at fault and who is responsible.”
With these words, he served up a scapegoat. As of Wednesday, the most wanted man in Italy was the worker who drives nails in the middle of the night. Police sketches are bound to follow, and once the culprit is identified, what will satisfy the thirst for vengeance? Perhaps a new security decree, making it a crime to touch a power cabinet at night. As for the punishment, it probably depends on the residence information contained in that much-sought-after tax code.
For the whole day, it seemed as if the trains had entered some parallel reality, together with the tens of thousands of people held hostage by Salvini's nail. At first, Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI) CEO Gianpiero Strisciuglio had to rule out a “hacker attack.” In reality, all it took was a nail. “This was a rare failure,” Strisciuglio claimed later. “It affected the electrical cabin that powers the circulation systems in the Rome nodes. Our workers intervened promptly, and at 8:30 a.m. circulation was restored.” The truth is that at 7:18 p.m., a statement from the Italian Railways warned that rail circulation was still affected by delays – a full 11 hours after what had been touted as an “emergency response.”
And the railway dystopia was only just beginning. After the theory of the mysterious hackers who had allegedly struck in the dead of night in that moonlit stretch of track between Termini and Tiburtina, people began to talk of “the presence of individuals” lurking suspiciously, avoiding surveillance and eager to commit sabotage. Right away, some thought to blame the much-vilified figures from among the “adversarial elements” who will be demonstrating on October 5. At that point, it still must have seemed that the height of ridiculousness had not yet been reached – and Salvini himself stepped up to the task.
As the crisis raged, the Transport Minister got busy writing a tweet in celebration of Grandparents Day in which he fondly remembered his childhood with his grandparents. That must have been why it took him so long to figure out a nail had been the culprit after the endless speculation about hackers and shadowy anti-government individuals. The comments on Salvini's grandparents post are hilarious. Comedians simply cannot keep pace with reality at this point.
“Salvini wants the name and surname of the person responsible? He should put down his own.” The minister “doesn’t bother with making the railways work, he’s only thinking about how to sell them off,” was a widespread sentiment shared by the opposition parties, which called for the resignation of Salvini and the top management of RFI. The latter pledged to “take action—including contractual action—against all those who have made mistakes or failed to rise to the occasion.” RFI considers itself a “great company” that “will not accept such things happening.”
It will have to take some time to recover from this public faceplant because of its lack of oversight. In the meantime, we should recall the data from the report of the Transport Regulatory Authority: during Salvini's tenure, there have been 10,000 interruptions of railway services, and their duration has been increasing over the past two years.
The FILT-CGIL and FIT-CISL unions have pointed to at least three factors that have helped turn the railway service map into Swiss cheese: the outsourcing of maintenance, which has worsened structural problems, the parceling out of organizational models that can lead to precisely such failures as were seen on Wednesday, and the lack of protection for railway workers, who have been waiting for the renewal of their collective contract that expired on December 31 last year.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/basta-un-chiodo-per-non-fare-arrivare-i-treni-sotto-salvini on 2024-10-03