[personlurking]

Here's a month-old YT video [11m] on this issue. Top comment is from an engineer on the project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hKXOfQ6JmE

> I am an engineer, I live in Venice and I do work on this project. The gates might have a lot of drawbacks, but at least they are not visible. The lagoon of Venice is practically a natural reserve, especially in the vicinity of the sea inlets: the gate project in the Rotterdam style was rejected exactly for this reason (and the inlet in Lido is almost 2 km wide, compared to the 0,4 km of the dutch project). The gates themselves are huge, they can easily withstand a tide of +3 m and need very little modification to go above this threshold. The main concerns lie with the environmental impact of their activation: firstly because they consume a lot of energy, secondly because they impact on the vital interaction of the lagoon with the Adriatic: in the worst case scenario, it is expected that by the end of the century, flooding above the 110 cm threshold will occur for 180 days per year, thus this problem needs to be carefully handled. For the concerns about the navigation and trade, an offshore port (with an underwater train connection) is being studied, an idea which could also remove all the container and cruise ships which are still allowed to enter the very shallow water of the lagoon.