ITALY: Disaster at Cornigliano

Cornigliano is a study in superlatives: Italy's biggest single postwar industrial construction, its biggest steel plant, its biggest ECA project. Three years and 44 million man-hours went into building Cornigliano; just to create its 250-acre site near Genoa, a million cubic yards of rubble fill were dumped into the Ligurian Sea. Cornigliano was to vitalize Italy's struggling steel industry, help cut its production costs 40% and raise its output 75%. The goal: to make Italian steel competitive for just about the first time since the Etruscans pounded out iron for the Greek trade in the 5th century B.C.

The U.S. put up almost half the plant's $160 million cost. It was jammed with U.S. equipment. Several hundred Italian engineers, technicians and workmen had been sent to the U.S. for the latest training. Cornigliano, government-owned, was a show spot of Italo-American cooperation.

It was also, therefore, a center of Communist enmity. In Genoa (which voted 43% Communist in the last election), the Red papers from the beginning criticized the plant, reported each death or injury there on Page One with black borders, and called it "The Cursed Foundry." At 7:30 on the evening of Jan. 7, in Cornigliano's big, new cold-rolling mill, a maintenance worker yelled, "Look out!" Two minutes later, with a giant crashing and a bending of massive girders, the mill's null roof lay shattered on the floor, and Italy's steel comeback was set back a year and a half.

Some blamed four inches of snow blanketing the roof, but this was not an unseasonal load, and the roof should have carried it easily. Others in Genoa's streets muttered darkly of profiteers. Last week, as investigators combed the wreckage, Cornigliano suspended all its building contractors until it determined whether bad design, faulty materials or sabotage caused the disaster. All Italy was downcast save for the Reds, who crowed that this was only what one might expect of "The Cursed Foundry."