In Venice, all eyes are on dramatic work at three lagoon inlets to hold back flood tides that repeatedly assault the historic Italian city. But along the mainland shore, engineers from the same construction consortium quietly are stemming more insidious flows of industrial pollution from Porto Marghera into the 550-sq-kilometer lagoon.
About two-thirds of a 57-km-long “fence” of sheet piling already has been driven to encircle polluted sites, says Alberto Bernstein, head of environmental engineering at Consorzio Venezia Nuova (CVN).