The entry says that the only question anyone put in writing, in four years, that the model could not answer and the mountain did, was asked by a newspaper correspondent in February 1961. This piece is about her and what she wrote. Tina Merlin was born at Trichiana, in the province of Belluno, on 19 August 1926, had been a courier for the partisans in the war, and from 1951 to 1967 was the local correspondent of L’Unità, the daily of the Italian Communist Party, for the province. The paper’s national edition is online; its Belluno pages, where her dispatches ran, are not, so the articles of 1959 to 1961 are known here from their titles as the parliamentary commission listed them, from the sentences the commission’s minority quoted, and from the two headlines the paper reproduced in facsimile on the morning after the disaster. Her dispatch of 10 October 1963 is in the national edition, and is quoted from it. The translations are mine.

5 May 1959

The commission’s list of the documents it gathered on the complaints from the valley begins with “correspondence from Belluno, signed Tina Merlin, in L’Unità of 5 May 1959, with the title ‘SADE lords it, but the mountain people defend themselves’”. The majority summarised it: the article “attributed to the concessionary company abuses concerning the forced expropriation of lands and houses, for which a popular demonstration was said to have taken place at Erto under the auspices of the Provincial Committee for the Rebirth of the Mountains. This discontent appears mainly related to the decision taken no longer to build the bridge over the lake and to the fear that the water of the artificial basin might ‘make the houses sink into the lake’.” The company went to the carabinieri. The minority report records what followed: an article “in which the responsibilities of SADE were denounced and the dangers to which the construction of the basin exposed the inhabitants of Erto were pointed out. An article which cost Merlin and the editor of L’Unità an appearance in court ‘for spreading false, exaggerated, tendentious news capable of disturbing public order’.” The trial was in Milan, and the commission’s list gives its date: “proceedings held before the Tribunal of Milan on 30 November 1960 against Pizzigoni Orazio and Merlin Tina, for the article published in L’Unità of 5 May 1959, and concluded with a sentence of acquittal”. The court’s reasons, the minority wrote, stated “that the artificial basin constituted and was considered a serious danger by the inhabitants of Erto, who feared the sinking of the houses”. The majority, which read the trial papers too, noted that the witnesses at the hearing had expressed the same fear for Erto that the villagers had been expressing since the dam was planned: that the lake, rising and falling against the slope their houses stood on, would bring it down.

Writing in 1963, Merlin remembered the trial this way: “At Milan many inhabitants of Erto generously offered to come and testify, who had stood beside me in their protests, in their public demonstrations, in sustaining the struggle; a thing which so many government and non-government parliamentarians of the time did not do, although they had been officially invited to intervene by the population. I and comrade Bettiol, who represented the Communist Party, were alone and always the only ones actively to support the reasons of the mountain people of Erto. They defended me energetically before the judges of the Tribunal of Milan and showed, with proofs and testimony, not only that I had written the truth, but that the whole village was in danger and that, together with Erto, the villages of the Longarone district too ran risks. The judges acquitted me, but the authorities who should have taken account of the facts and prevented a possible massacre gave SADE a free hand instead for its criminal experiments.”

8 November 1960

The slide of 4 November 1960 was in the paper four days later. The commission lists “correspondence from Belluno, signed Tina Merlin, in L’Unità of 8 November 1960, with the title ‘The threat in the Vajont valley grows. A gigantic landslide falls at Erto into the artificial lake built by SADE’”, and on 11 October 1963 the paper printed the clipping beside her new dispatch, with its sub-heading: “The waters of the basin have risen by more than a metre. By luck the collapse occurred on the bank opposite the village. The population vividly alarmed.” The slide was 700,000 cubic metres by the commission’s count and about 800,000 by Carlo Semenza’s, and it fell in less than half an hour; the wave it made, the Corps of Engineers wrote later, was two metres high. Nobody was hurt. It was, Edoardo Semenza wrote, “relatively slow, producing modest wave action”, and it became the pattern everyone expected the mountain to keep to.

21 February 1961

The third article is the one that matters. The commission lists it as “correspondence from Belluno, signed Tina Merlin, in L’Unità of 21 February 1961, with the title ‘An enormous mass of 50 million cubic metres threatens the life and goods of the inhabitants of Erto’”; the minority gives the full headline, “While SADE is left the possibility of evading its obligations under the law, an enormous mass of 50 million cubic metres threatens the life and goods of the inhabitants of Erto”, and quotes the question in it: “It cannot be known whether the collapse will be slow or whether it will come with a terrible crash. In the latter case the consequences cannot be foreseen.” The same article announced that a delegation of the Belluno provincial council, led by its president, was going to Rome. On 11 October 1963 the paper put the headline in facsimile at the foot of its front page under the words “We wrote it two years ago”.

The figure of 50 million was not hers alone. The majority found it “in an article published in L’Unità by the journalist Merlin and in the intervention of the provincial councillor of Belluno, the Honourable Francesco Giorgio Bettiol, in the session of 13 February 1961”, and measured it: “50 million cubic metres, that is about a quarter of what was the most pessimistic forecast hypothesised in the report of Professor Müller”. Müller’s report of 3 February 1961, which put the mass at 200 million, had gone to SADE eighteen days before; the number outside the company was a quarter of the number inside it. On 13 February the provincial council had voted unanimously to send its executive to the ministers “so that all the safety measures be arranged in good time to guarantee the safety of the populations in the zone of the Vajont basin”; at the end of the month the mayors of Pieve d’Alpago, Longarone and Ponte nelle Alpi, “belonging to different political alignments”, put a motion to the assembly of the Piave basin’s local bodies that was also carried unanimously. The minister of public works answered the council’s president in a letter of 5 May 1961 which described the slide of November, the ministry’s inspection of 7 November, the testing commission’s visit with Penta, the network of pillars and piezometers and the bypass tunnel, and said that the company had been instructed to carry out the checks “keeping the Dam Service informed, with weekly reports”. The minority’s comment was that the letter showed “clearly that the Public Administration and the political authority kept the truth silent from the populations and the elected bodies”.

The majority’s reading of all the warnings, hers included, was that they had been about the wrong thing. “Before the landslide of November 1960 the correspondence published in L’Unità had as its main purpose that of giving voice to the discontent at feared economic damage concerning ‘goods threatened or expropriated by SADE’, with express reference to the supposed dangers for the yielding of the ground on which the inhabited centre of Erto rests on the right edge of the basin. A danger of landslides or slips of the right bank was indicated, without any mention of dangers on the left bank where the disaster occurred.” After November 1960 “some concern also emerges for the villages below the dam, but this in direct relation to the resistance of the dam. The question was asked, that is, whether the dam would be able to resist possible landslides of material in movement, far greater in volume than that of the landslide of 1960.” The report’s conclusion was that “the forecasts that moved persons and local bodies to the interventions spoken of were not different from what had been foreseen by the technicians and in particular by the geologists: but that nobody had even indirectly hypothesised the catastrophic phenomenon of the overtopping of the wave above the dam”. That is true of the mechanism. It is not true of the question. Whether the collapse would be slow or sudden was the one thing on which everything else turned, and the engineers, with four times her figure for the mass and a model to put it to, did not put it.

10 October 1963

She reached the valley on the night of the 9th with three colleagues, and wrote on the 10th from Belluno. The paper gave her dispatch most of its second page under the heading “L’Unità was prosecuted for having denounced the danger”, with the headline of 8 November 1960 reproduced beside it. The text begins: “It was a genocide. The few survivors cry it out, driven mad by the terror of the avalanche of water and by the desperation of finding themselves alone and powerless to overcome a tragic reality, made by now of nothing, or rather made of stones and mud amalgamated with the blood of their dear ones. A reality that has suddenly overturned the physiognomy of whole villages, but which was unfortunately foreseeable for years, since, still at the beginning of the works of the great hydroelectric reservoir of the Vajont, the technicians knew they were building on clayey and landslide-prone ground, which could therefore lead to catastrophe.”

“I affirm that there are moral and material responsibilities. I have followed the affair of the Vajont reservoir with the passion not only of a journalist, but of a daughter of this peasant and mountain people which rebels against the rhetoric of the ‘traditional virtues’ that ill hides the cynicism of the most pitiless exploitation. With this heart I have followed all the vicissitudes, the resistances, the fears of the mountain people of Erto against SADE, not to prevent it from building the great hydroelectric basin of the Vajont, but to prevent it from committing a crime. The intuition and the experience of those mountain people, comforted moreover by the opinions of great geologists, indicated the Vajont valley as unsuited to bear the pressure of 160 million cubic metres of water. Reality has shown the mountain people right, not the technicians of SADE. The electricity company knew that the walls of the reservoir were formed of the ground of an enormous landslide fallen hundreds of years ago, on which the village of Erto afterwards rose. It knew that Monte Toc was itself part of that landslide and that it was foreseeable that the water let into the basin would slowly erode the subsoil and cause disasters. Four years ago, when the resistance of the basin was tested, great cracks had marked the houses of San Martino and of the other hamlets of Erto on the slopes of the Toc.”

And the ending: “I am writing these lines with my heart gripped by remorse for not having done more to induce the people of these lands to rebel against the mortal threat that has now become a tragic reality. Today, however, one cannot only weep. It is time to learn something.”

She went on writing about the Vajont for the rest of her life. The book she made of it, Sulla pelle viva. Come si costruisce una catastrofe, “On living skin: how a catastrophe is built”, found no publisher for years and came out in Milan in 1983. She died on 22 December 1991. The parliamentary commission’s majority, in 1965, had found that the courts and the ministries had behaved correctly and that nobody had foreseen the wave. Its minority, listing what SADE and the state had known and kept, put her article of 5 May 1959 first.

Sources

• Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sul disastro del Vajont, Relazione finale, Senato della Repubblica, IV Legislatura, Documento n. 76-bis, 15 July 1965: the list of documents with the titles and dates of the three articles and of the Milan trial; the majority’s analysis of the complaints and of the 50 million; the minority’s account of the 1959 prosecution, the court’s reasons, the February 1961 article and the minister’s letter of 5 May 1961. In my translation. certifico.com
• Tina Merlin, “L’Unità fu processata per aver denunciato il pericolo,” L’Unità, 11 October 1963, p. 2, with the facsimile of the headline of 8 November 1960; and the front page of the same day with the facsimile of the headline of 21 February 1961. In my translation. p. 2, p. 1
• Associazione culturale Tina Merlin, “Biographical notes of Tina Merlin”: her birth, her years at L’Unità, the book and its publication, and her death. tinamerlin.it
• A. J. Hendron Jr. and F. D. Patton, The Vaiont Slide, Technical Report GL-85-5, US Army Corps of Engineers, 1985, Volume II, Appendix G, for Edoardo Semenza’s description of the slide of 4 November 1960. archive.org