Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

The Administration intervenes for the reclamation, replacing the owner of the property  

Milan, May 29 2019 - The Municipality of Milan starts the asbestos removal works in the private area of ​​the former Galvanica in via Bazzi, southern area of ​​the city. Two roofs will be removed, one of a shed and the other of the former factory building (350 square meters of asbestos in total), for a job that will last about a month and for which around seventy thousand euros have been allocated.

It is a private building, located in a private area, on which the Administration has nevertheless decided to intervene for the necessary asbestos removal, replacing the owner of the property.

The story dates back to 2007, when the owner of the business that had been abandoned for years, later criminally convicted for an environmental crime, poured substances polluting the aquifer such as hexavalent chromium and other metals into the land - which is still under seizure. Even the building, built with an asbestos roof, was abandoned to itself.

Over the years, the Municipality of Milan has ordered the property several times to provide for the reclamation, cleaning and safety of the area, but to no avail. For this reason he decided to launch a series of replacement actions.
Last October, an investigation was conducted to verify the possible presence of airborne asbestos fibers inside the neighboring building in Via Bazzi 18, home to the Gaetana Agnesi state high school, which for some time had been sending alarm signals to the Administration for the potential risk: the investigation concluded positively for citizens, i.e. no polluting presence of asbestos fibers in the atmosphere was detected, and the results have already been communicated to the school community. Starting in January, in two different stages, the waste present on the ground and inside the buildings was removed, and the entire area was cleaned to allow the construction site to start.
Another step will concern the reclamation of the land: as regards the aquifer, a hydraulic containment intervention has already been carried out with the construction of dam wells, a temporary solution costing around 255 thousand euros which will be overcome thanks to the complete and definitive reclamation of the land already approved by the Board.

Finally, the abandoned warehouses will be demolished. This last phase will have to be agreed in advance with the Public Prosecutor's Office of the Court of Milan, with which the Municipality is interacting regarding actions against the property and its assets.

“The long and complex affair of Via Bazzi, which has remained at a standstill for a long time due to the legal difficulty of intervening in private property that has been seized, is finally at a turning point – declares the Councilor for Public Works Gabriele Rabaiotti -. Securing the area is the first step to definitively eliminate a source of degradation for the entire neighborhood; We now hope that the dialogue with the Public Prosecutor's Office will lead us to a definitive solution as soon as possible that will allow us to imagine a future for the former factory area".