The Morandi Bridge collapse and regulatory capture

Lower image: Eugenio Ceroni and Luca Cozzi, Ponte Morandi - Autopsia di una strage

A recurring topic in Understanding Society is the question of the organizational causes that lie in the background of major accidents and technological disasters. One such disaster is the catastrophic collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa in August, 2018, which resulted in the deaths of 43 people. Was this a technological failure, a design failure -- or importantly a failure in which private and public organizational features led to the disaster?

A major story in the New York Times on March 5, 2019 (link) makes it clear that social and organizational causes were central to this horrendous failure. (What could be more terrifying than having the highway bridge under your vehicle collapse to the earth 150 feet beneath you?) In this case it is evident from the Times coverage that a major cause of the disaster was the relationship between Autostrade per l'Italia, the private company that manages the bridge and derives enormous profit from it, and the regulatory ministries responsible for regulating and supervising safe operations of highways and bridges.

In a sign of the arrogance of wealth and power involved in the relationship, the Benetton family threatened a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the economist Marco Ponti who had served on an expert panel advising the government and had made strong statements about the one-sided relationship that existed. The threat was not acted upon, but the abuse of power is clear.

This appears to be a textbook case of "regulatory capture", a situation in which the private owners of a risky enterprise or activity use their economic power to influence or intimidate the government regulatory agencies that nominally oversee their activities. "Autostrade reaped huge profits and acquired so much power that the state became a largely passive regulatory" (NYT March 5, 2019). Moreover, independent governmental oversight was crippled by the fact that "the company effectively regulated itself-- because Autostrade's parent company owned the inspection company responsible for safety checks on the Morandi Bridge" (NYT). The Times quotes Carlo Scarpa, and economics professor at the University of Brescia:

Any investor would have been worried about bidding. The Benettons, though, knew the system and they understood that the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, which was supposed to supervise the whole thing, was weak. They were able to calculate the weight the company would have in the political arena. (NYT March 5, 2019)

And this seems to have worked out as the family expected:

Autostrade became a political powerhouse, acquiring clout that the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, perpetually underfunded and employing a small fraction of the staff, could not match. (NYT March 5, 2019)

The story notes that the private company made a great deal of money from this contract, but that the state also benefited financially. "Autostrade has poured billions of euros into state coffers, paying nearly 600 million euros a year in corporate taxes, V.A.T. and license fees."

The story also surfaces other social factors that played a role in the disaster, including opposition by Genoa residents to the construction involved in creating a potential bypass to the bridge.

Here is what the Times story has to say about the inspections that occurred:

Beyond fixing blame for the bridge collapse, a central question of the Morandi tragedy is what happened to safety inspections. The answer is that the inspectors worked for Autostrade more than for the state. For decades, Spea Engineering, a Milan-based company, has performed inspections on the bridge. If nominally independent, Spea is owned by Autostrade's parent company, Atlantia, and Autostrade is also Spea's largest customer. Spea's offices in Rome and elsewhere are housed inside Autostrade. One former bridge design engineer for Spea, Giulio Rambelli, described Autostrade's control over Spea as "absolute," (NYT March 5, 2019)

The story notes that this relationship raises the possibility of conflicts of interest that are prohibited in other countries. The story quotes Professor Giuliano Fonderico: "All this suggests a system failure."

The failure appears to be first and foremost a failure of the state to fulfill its obligations of regulation and oversight of dangerous activities. By ceding any real and effective system of safety inspection to the business firms who are benefitting from the operations of the bridge, the state has essentially given up its responsibility of ensuring the safety of the public.

It is also worth underlining the point made in the article about the huge mismatch that exists between the capacities of the business firms in question and the agencies nominally charged to regulate and oversee them. This is a system-level failure at a higher level, since it highlights the fact of the power imbalance that almost always exists between large corporate wealth and the government agencies charged to oversee their activities.

Here is an editorial from the Guardian that makes some similar points; link. There don't appear to be book-length treatments of the Morandi Bridge disaster available in English. Here is an Italian book on the subject by Eugenio Ceroni and Luca Cozzi, Ponte Morandi - Autopsia di una strage: I motivi tecnici, le colpe, gli errori. Quel che si poteva fare e non si è fatto (Italian Edition), which appears to be a technical civil-engineering analysis of the collapse. The Kindle translate option using Bing is helpful for non-Italian readers to get the thrust of this short book. In the engineering analysis inadequate inspection and incomplete maintenance remediation are key factors in the collapse.