A court in the central
Italian city of Chieti on Friday acquitted all 19 defendants in
a trial into a toxic waste dumped by now-defunct Montedison
chemical company at Bussi sul Tirino, near Pescara.
The court cleared the defendants of the crime of water
poisoning and reclassified another charge, environmental
disaster, to culpable disaster and ruled that the statue of
limitations had passed on this.
The dump of toxic waste was discovered in 2007.
The Montediso managers were put on trial in November 2013
for illegally burying 250,000 tonnes of toxic waste near a river
in the Pescara area, contaminating the water table and the
public water supply with heavy metals.
Toxic spills reached as much as one tonne daily into the
Tirino River, prosecutors during the trial.
They also alleged that the managers knew that acid in
waste dumped at Bussi sul Tirino could melt cement containers
and contaminate water tables.
Experts from Italy's Higher Institute for Health (ISS)
told the trial in one hearing that people living in and around
Pescara had been eating mercury-contaminated vegetables since
1981.
Mercury was found in fish and in the hair of Pescara-area
fishermen as far back as 1972, the ISS added in a court-evidence
report.
Contaminated water was distributed to roughly 700,000
people for years throughout a vast part of central Italy as a
result, the ISS found.
The ISS added that lead contamination was also a concern.
The State body said "even hospitals and schools" in the
province of Pescara were victims of poisons that infiltrated the
water supply near Bussi sul Tirino, a small town located between
two national parks and about 40 km from Pescara.
Since 1901, Bussi has been an industrial site producing
chemicals for both civilian and military use including tear gas,
poison gas, explosives, and alloys for armored vehicles.
Beginning in the 1960s, the area's plants came under the
control of Montedison, with production focusing on other highly
toxic materials such as tetraethyl lead and methyl chloride.
Much of the area's population worked for Montedison, a
large industrial chemicals producer active from the 1960s to the
1990s.
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