#ASimpleCalculation. While state secrecy is in force in Italy, some details of the agreement with Meloni arrive from Albania. The thirty-six thousand migrants – without differences between holders of the right of asylum and others – will be brought to Albanian land “with state ships” through the port of Shengjin. From Lampedusa (and even more from the open sea to the South) Shengjin is about 520 nautical miles away: a journey that the patrol boats dedicated to rescue could not make: due to its proportions (they are not able to accommodate people on board for long) and due to their unfitness to make long journeys (over a thousand miles round trip for each operation). If, absurdly, a unit of the 300 class – the self-righting and unsinkable boats that the Coast Guard employs in the rescue operations in Lampedusa – were to undertake this journey, at a speed of 30 knots it would take around 18 hours just for the outward journey, without canteen, berths, sickbay, deck spaces, crew preparations. Which operations room would order a patrol boat of these characteristics to disembark shipwrecked people in Shengjin?
Unless larger ships are made available under the agreement: the migrants would then have to be collected in Lampedusa, as now, together with the many who arrive there independently, and on the island the authorities would be required to proceed with the recognition and start of asylum procedures.
A simple calculation, but has anyone done it?
* retired admiral, former head of the Coast Guard press office
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