Word: cornigliano
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...Both the Cornigliano and Terni plants are owned by Finsider (Finanziaria Siderurgica), a government-owned steel trust set up by Mussolini to modernize Italy's steel industry. (It now controls 45% of the industry.) The trust did not do very well with the production of rolled steel: total production last year was only 300,000 tons, barely half the country's requirements. When it reaches capacity in about two years, Cornigliano alone will roll 458,000 tons, and should be able to undersell other Italian-made steel by 25%. Armco will send 60 technicians to Italy to train...