Genoa – The beams of the scaffolding, instead of being perfectly smooth and compliant with the law, had “knots” which favored cracking and consequent breakage, as a result of which a worker and father of a family lost his life. It was the period of the explosion of construction sites and the almost piecework installation of scaffolding meant that often poor quality materials were imported and often from abroad, Romania in primis, without safety certifications.
The investigation revealed it definitively death of Davide D’Aprile, the 54-year-old bricklayer who crashed in September 2021 in via Cecchi alla Foce. For that matter, the Public Prosecutor’s Office asked to prosecute Virgilio Pirinu, 65, owner of Sp Ponteggi who materially installed the equipment on behalf of EdilPaba, assignee of the overall restyling of the property and in the end deemed unrelated to the charges.
Assembly times and testimonials
In the sights of the prosecutor Francesca Rombolà, owner of the file, the assembly times were over. The magistrates wanted to understand if the worker had not tied the harness to the upright due to his own lightness, but the circumstance – already considered “highly improbable” by colleagues, who have repeatedly defined the victim as a “very experienced” worker – was definitively shelved with the continuation of the reliefs, carried out by local health inspectors specialized in prevention in working environments, led by Gabriele Mercurio.
In the documentation forwarded by the investigators to the prosecutors, it had been highlighted that some fundamental safety devices were missing on the construction site: in some segments, for example, the so-called “lifeline” was not present, on which the carabiners of the harness are fixed to avoid falling when it moves horizontally. And yet all the testimonies collected at the time had certified that D’Aprile had taken every mandatory and available precaution. Later it was examination of materials to write the decisive word: it was discovered that the wood of the beams was of poor quality, to the point of breaking in a juncture causing the fatal accident.
Boom of violations discovered after the increase in controls
Following the tragedy in via Cecchi, it should be remembered, it was created a new protocol for building inspections, which made it possible to strengthen the ASL inspectorate with the collaboration of the carabinieri, and in the first year of investigations the penalties increased by 25-30%. «Without this new protocol, called an “ethical site” – explained several times the deputy prosecutor Francesco Pinto, coordinator of the pool of robes that investigates cases of accidents at work – the checks would never have been carried out, since the health they had sufficient human resources. The magistrate has repeatedly highlighted “the clear connection between the proliferation of often insecure construction sites and bonuses for restructuring”.
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