On deadly ground

When industrialisation came to one of Sicily's most beautiful stretches of coastline, it was greeted as a miracle by poverty stricken locals. Fifty years on, amid allegations of a high-level cover-up, the appalling price of 'progress' is being revealed, writes Peter Popham

The equation is brutally simple: industrialisation at the speed of a tornado plus delinquent government equals an epidemic of birth defects and a storm of fatal tumours.

Augusta, the city north of Syracuse on Sicily's exquisite east coast that was first colonised by the ancient Greeks in the 8th century BC, today boasts the highest concentration of chemical plants in Europe. Fifty years ago, Augusta was a byword for the way that a ferocious bout of factory building, starting with Esso's monster oil refinery, could transform impoverished fishermen and olive farmers into technicians and factory workers overnight. "The people here were very poor," says Enzo Parisi, an environmentalist in the city. "They saw industrialisation as a miracle."

Augusta was thus hauled gladly from its bucolic past into the white heat of the middle of the 20th century. But 50 years on, the city's glory days are long gone, and the bitter taste left in Augusta's mouth is not just the ubiquitous filth in the air but promises bitterly betrayed, mutating into nightmares unimagined.

If a woman bears a child in the city of Catania, about 80km north of Augusta, she runs approximately a 1.5 per cent risk of the baby being born with defects. That's close to the Italian average. In Augusta, however – for reasons that, to the layman, appear blindingly obvious – the rate has long been climbing higher and higher. This week, it emerged that in 2002, for the first time, it hit 6 per cent. Today, an Augusta baby has a 6 per cent chance of emerging from the womb with a damaged kidney, a deformed cardiac system, or missing half an arm or a leg or several fingers.

Dr Liliana Blandino, a psychologist in Augusta, gave birth to such a child nearly 20 years ago: his heart was so deformed that at the age of three he had to be taken to Marseilles – no Italian hospital could perform the operation – for surgery to save his life. Today, Jonata is a tall, spindly, wide-eyed 19-year-old with a frizzy ponytail, attending the city's scientific lycée; and this week he published his first book of poems, entitled The Years of the Heart. In his poems, he writes of suffering as something that happens to others, something that he has trouble imagining:

"I've seen on television

people who die

people who go mad

and people who suffer

people who would like a little bit of love

but receive only pain."

Thanks to the operation he had as an infant, Jonata, like any normal adolescent, experiences grief at one remove. "I'm very lucky," says his mother, "because my son's deformity is inside and not visible. But if it hadn't been for the operation, he would have died, and when he was little I was always worried about losing him. Now he's fine, he's strong, he has no problems. But for women who are pregnant here today, the dilemma is terrible. Before deciding whether to have their baby, they must weigh the risks that it will be deformed."

The man who knows more about those risks than anyone else is Dr Giacinto Franco, and he is a brave and angry man: bald, pop-eyed, solidly built, a single flexing muscle of impotent rage and indignation. He lives in a fine stuccoed villa on a hill above the town, with a rolling lawn, small delicate trees, dogs and cats; but gusts of effluent from the belching smokestacks lined up along the bay a mile or two to the south rip through the garden, tickling the nose, nauseating the palate, sitting heavy on the chest like a curse.

Dr Franco, working in the local hospital since 1969, has watched helplessly as a ghastly harvest of birth defects and fatal lung cancers has matured before his eyes. And while nobody else has been counting – the city, he says, has avoided keeping a comprehensive register of malignant tumours, including those that do not lead to death, because the results would be "stratospheric" – he has kept a close eye on the problem ever since the delivery in 1980 of a baby boy with half of one ear missing and severe deformity of the spine.

"The industrialisation that started in 1956 in this beautiful area was savage," he says. "It destroyed 12km of coast between Augusta and Syracuse, one of the most beautiful stretches in Sicily, also a very important zone for archaeology. They completely trashed it, with the compliance of the authorities. It was close to this densely populated town. It was in an area of high seismic activity. But none of that mattered. They destroyed it, and without any respect for the norms of industrial development.

"For example, officially they were required to treat factory effluent before discharging it into the sea. But they never did so. They were banned from discharging waste into the sea altogether in 1985, but they are still doing it today. It has been a total slaughter. In 1979 there was the first epidemic of fish dying of some strange ailment. Next year, the first severely deformed baby was born. You put two and two together. We've been carefully monitoring births here, we've got statistics from 1980 up to now, and the incidence of deformity has been rising steadily year by year, till last year, for the first time, it hit six per cent.

"I've also studied the causes of death in the area, from the pre-industrial period to the present. Today, there are respiratory diseases of every kind. And one man in three – it's overwhelmingly men – dies of lung cancer. An area is described as having a tumour crisis when 25 per cent of the population is affected, and that includes tumours that don't lead to death, but here there has never been an official register of cases. But we've carried out a survey of tumours in six communities including Augusta, and the rate of tumours was 291 per cent higher than the national average."

The rampant misbehaviour of the companies, big and small, clustered around Augusta could not have happened, says Dr Franco, without the collusion of the authorities, the silence of the local media, and the apathy of the local people. "In 50 years, the industries have destroyed everything and respected nothing," he says. "They've buried toxic waste right across the landscape – put a stick in the ground and you hit it. And the people in the city don't want to know. They're deaf to it."

Enzo Parisi, a maritime agent in the port of Augusta who, in his spare time, is an activist with Legambiente, Italy's biggest environmental NGO, gives a historical perspective on the disaster. "This stretch of coast was the first place that the ancient Greeks colonised," he says. "They settled here because they found plentiful water, an all-weather port, and valiant people. They brought civilisation: Plato came here three times, his Republic is based on what he saw in Syracuse."

"Three thousand years on, we've had a new colonisation – for exactly the same reasons: fresh water, the port, the same valiant people. In the Fifties, the people here were poor farmers and fishermen, they saw the arrival of the factories as a kind of miracle. A statue of the Madonna in Syracuse was seen to weep. Now, perhaps we think that the Madonna's tears had a different significance...

"The violent industrialisation destroyed the heritage of the region, ruined the quality of the water and the air, but people only saw the benefits: farmers went up in the world, became technicians in the factories. The smoke, the blackened sea were seen as signs of progress.

"That was the case until the end of the 1970s. But in the 1980s, people began to think differently. They saw people dying, and they also saw the workforce shrinking. At their peak, the factories employed 12,000 people; today, the figure is no more than 2,000. Slowly, the attitude towards the industries changed. Today, people see them as the enemy."

So, if the downside of industrialisation in Augusta is so stark, and the benefits have shrunk to vanishing point, how have the polluters continued to get away with it? Corruption, collusion, conspiracy, the suspicions swirl here as they swirl around so many other Italian scandals, without ever coming to the point at which the guilty are convicted and the evil is undone.

"In the Nineties," Parisi continues, "we were classified as an area of environmental crisis, and in 1995, the President of the Republic signed off around 90 projects to improve the situation, worth some €5m. Now, it has been revealed that the money has been sitting in the bank all this time, while they argued about how to divide it up. No projects have been started, nothing's got better, everything's got worse. We've learned that many of the city's aquifers are badly contaminated: what stopped people in their tracks was when one farmer drew water from his well and it wasn't water but pure petrol!"

This year, at last, things have begun to stir. The manager and a handful of technicians at the oil refinery have been arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy and illegal trafficking of waste. They are currently in custody, awaiting trial. And the man leading the investigation, Roberto Campisi, the public prosecutor of Syracuse, has had red mullet caught from the waters offshore from the factories (where commercial fishing has long been banned) and analysed in the laboratory. The findings were released this week: in their stomachs were found lead, nickel, arsenic, and, most sinister of all, mercury – 500 times the legal maximum.

Mercury is the heavy metal that was found to be responsible for the so-called "Minamata syndrome" that struck fishing villages in Japan's Inland Sea in the 1960s, leading to appalling deformities, paralysis, dementia and death in the local children. Slowly, very belatedly, the prosecutor is stitching together the evidence that will make it impossible for the polluters to evade their responsibilities any further.

But by that time it may be too late, because as the nemesis of helter-skelter industrialisation closes in on Augusta, the perpetrators are quietly packing their bags, shutting up shop and leaving town. "The chemical plants are closing down," says Parisi. "We'll be left no cleaner, just poorer. Because the responsibility for cleaning up the pollution lies with the polluting companies. If they close down, there will be no-one to pick up the bill."

Perhaps that fact helps to explain the apparent diffidence of the people of Augusta as eco-disaster breaks over them. "It's the worst thing about this place," says Dr Blandino, echoing Dr Franco. "The apathy – they're all deaf." Unemployment is high and climbing. The factories that for a couple of decades offered a leg-up out of poverty, now offer nothing but a living hell. Yet people don't agitate, for fear of killing off the jobs that remain. The citizens of Augusta are transfixed between a past that has betrayed them, and a future of unimaginable bleakness.

"Imbeciles!" cries Dr Franco, looking down over the sprawl of chimneys. "This could have been a world-class tourist resort! Imbeciles!"