NAPLES, Italy — The Agnano neighborhood of Naples — on the very compound that once housed a U.S. Navy base —will be the site of the city’s future incinerator, Italian news media are reporting this week.
Faced with a deadline from the city’s "trash czar," Mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino announced the government’s selection of the site on Monday.
The incinerator, which the government refers to as a "waste-to-energy plant" will be modeled after one used in Vienna, Austria, several Italian media reported.
The site is a few miles from the Allied Joint Force Command headquarters in Bagnoli, and on the outskirts of the suburb Pozzuoli, home to thousands of U.S. and NATO personnel serving in Naples.
The incinerator will be housed on five acres that once housed the U.S. Navy’s shopping compound in Agnano. The U.S. Navy leased the property for more than 40 years, finally closing it in 2005 and turning it over to 12 landlords, said Lt. Paul Macapagal, Naval Support Activity spokesman.
Since the property was turned over in 2005, the Navy no longer is responsible for anything on that site, he said. Buildings that used to house the exchange, commissary and eateries, bank and furniture store remain. The horseshoe-shaped building that served as the middle and high school now houses Italian students, and the building that used to be the Navy’s hospital, located on an adjacent hill, has been vacant for years.
In May, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced that the Italian government would open nine dump sites in the Campania region, and Naples would build an incinerator at an undetermined location. If the local government couldn’t find a location for the incinerator within 30 days, the newly appointed "trash czar," Guido Bertolaso, would do it for them.
This week’s selection of Agnano as the site for the incinerator is bound to draw angry protests from residents who have vowed to fight the government’s decision to build the plant in their neighborhood, according to media reports.
Officials selected Agnano, which also boasts the city’s racetrack, in an effort to evenly distribute the "cumbersome" burden neighborhoods have to endure as Naples tries to dig itself out of yet another trash crisis, Iervolino said.
Quarries in Chiaiano and Marano, in the northern section of town, will be used for landfills. Other landfills, said to be brimming with garbage already, are being reopened to accommodate more garbage.
The state and city governments too have paid to have trashed hauled north to Germany or taken to the Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily.
