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Somewhere, on the Internet, I read that the real attitude of each of us is the one that showed when we were children and left alone in a room. Without external judgment, free to truly express ourselves, we chose the game that best revealed our passion. In my case, I sang Céline Dion songs at the top of my lungs (and especially My Heart Will Go On, thanks James Cameron). You had a yellow helmet on your head, right? Where did your passion for the underground world come from and what is your first memory in a tunnel?
It’s actually an interesting story. As a child, I lived in a country hotel with my family. One day one of the guests died inside the hotel. I found a box of stones that had belonged to him: he had no family, so I started to look at his stones and I thought they were really interesting. They weren’t gemstones, of course, just rocks. So it started.
Then I went to Jindabyne, I must have been 8 years old or maybe 9. When I got there, the Snowy Mountains One* was just starting to come to completion so there were still a lot of old-time miners still doing their work.
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* The Australia Snowy Mountains projects refer to both the original Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme (completed 1949–1974) 1.0 and the ongoing Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro-storage project.
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I started to talk to them, I confessed that I liked rocks very much and so they ended up taking me into the tunnels, even though it was illegal. Thanks to those two experiences, rocks, tunnels, quarries and the ground became something really special to me. It’s a wonder I didn’t get killed because I was a total maniac as a kid, climbing up in quarries, cliffs just to explore rocks.
With the Snowy project, though, I first got introduced to the concept of listening to the rocks, actually touching and smelling them, feeling what is going on: the old miners, with their funny European accent, said you had to listen to the mountain. Obviously, they didn’t mean it the way I thought, they were speaking more of getting a feeling for the rocks and how they were behaving. That was when that concept first entered my little head as a very young boy.
My parents were absolutely disinterested, they could not care less! They couldn’t believe I was interested in rocks. They were just almost apologetic, they thought they had failed: “Sorry, our son likes rocks. It’s a bit weird, obviously we did something wrong.” When I decided to enroll at University, in the Bachelor of Science specializing in Hard Rock Geology, that was the low point, I think, in my relationship with my parents. They wanted me to work in a hotel and manage hotels as they had done and were still doing, because in fact, I also do cooking, food prep, cleaning plates, clearing tables, pulling beers. It would have been okay if I wanted to be a bartender, but doing rocks was a bit out of line.
So, geology was not a tradition in my family, even though in Australia mining is a big part of what we do here.
Looking back, my first job was actually in an open-pit uranium mine. That’s where I did my first research but I wasn’t really interested in gold, in minerals … I was still interested in rocks. I really like the idea of building spaces and building connections. I like that the underground was something you could craft, like inside-out architecture.
And even as a child I built underground shelters we called “cubby houses”. I don’t know if this term exists in Italy, but they were shelters built with leftover construction materials, climbing up a tree, where children could hide. I would dig a hole and use the material to build a sort of shelter, so my little houses were underground. That’s what I did also as a child. It’s a miracle I didn’t die, because of course I didn’t know the risks but I didn’t worry: I just did it.
What is the value of the underground for you?
I get very emotional about the underground, not because I want to live underground but because I celebrate being on the surface. I love the sunrise, I love the trees, the sky, the wind on my face. I like swimming. And it’s precisely thanks to my love of the surface that I see the huge value in the underground, because the underground allows us to place services, transport, water, sewage, energy in a place that frees the surface for us. This way we can see the sky, we can smell the breeze. And I think that with urbanization, even more, this glimpse of sky, the rain on your forehead, things like that, are becoming more and more rare.
The underground is this tool that allows us to offer our people and also the environment a better life: that is what excites me. Of course, in difficult times, we can use the underground as a refuge, as a shelter—whether from climate, enemies or any other hostility, the underground can be used. But it’s not where I want to be or where I aspire to live.
You often speak about the time you spent in Asian countries, and more recently you helped create a National Association in Papua New Guinea. Today, emerging economies are designing and building major underground infrastructures as tools for sustainable development and to confront climate challenges. In your view, what is the social meaning of underground works?
Urbanization is happening at an incredible speed and in developing countries the quality of life is generally very low, especially for fundamental things like sewerage, drinking water, transport, and energy.
I was supposed to go to Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There have a sewage system designed for 100,000 people, but millions of people live there. The Congo River is really polluted. For drinking water, they rely on wells, but it is actually sewage water they’re drawing. This is a clear example of how beneficial it would be to have underground infrastructures, especially to sustain urbanization.
Think of Paris, London, New York, Moscow … there is not a single major city in the world that could function at the current standard of living without clean water, sewage, transport, energy. This is what we do underground: we give people a dignified life. This is not politics, which can change. This is the quality of life, the certainty of being able to wake up in the morning, go to work, and know you won’t get sick.
As far as I know, our infrastructures save more lives every day than all the doctors in the world, because we prevent illness. And that’s why no one congratulates us—because they forget the reason since disasters don’t happen. Why they don’t get sick, why people live to 80 or 90 years old, is because throughout their entire lives they have had clean water and sewage. We forget that, just as we forget the generations of workers who built them.
It is often said that safety and health on worksites are cultural issues. What do you think are the fundamental values of worksite safety?
We’re at a really interesting crossroad historically right now. Of course, we must distinguish between types of risks, but there are huge differences from country to country, and not only that—there are also enormous differences in access to technology.
In powerful economies we use advanced robotics, which keeps workers at a safe distance. Often, they don’t even need to go underground anymore: the robots put themselves at risk to do the construction. This is a natural progression of countries with economic resources.
But in other countries, building infrastructure means work, and often poorly paid work. We’re talking about 3 euros an hour, with projects carried out entirely by hand. If they are lucky enough to have machines, they’re the kind of machines we would have used 60 or 80 years ago—mechanical, noisy, hot. And it is considered acceptable, because it is part of a work program: “At least they are working, at least they are building something for their country.”
At the moment there is a huge disparity in what is considered an acceptable minimum for worksite safety. And let’s remember: right now many people are dying while building tunnels in the world. They die and nobody talks about it. This is one of the great challenges.
For me, in my President of ITA time, I pushed very hard for developing countries to have competency certificates for fundamental activities like rock bolting, shotcrete, at least for the basics, so that workers could have some awareness. We tried, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to do it as quickly as I hoped. In fact, I think this is one of the points where I failed. From the beginning, I literally begged for a minimum, for a basic competence that ITA could certify also for developing countries.
I wasn’t asking to immediately achieve world best practice standards but to progress step by step—teaching how to install rock bolts, how to operate rock drills, how to use shotcrete, how to mix correctly. The problem is that ITA, as an international body, believes it must always propose only world best practices. I understand this, but in the meantime, people are literally dying. I don’t care if it is not the best practice, we need at least something acceptable, something we can do, a minimum.
This is very real to me, because I have personally seen the dead bodies of workers. But for many people, especially those with an academic approach, what I say is repugnant—intellectually repugnant.
I understand that it is unpleasant to certify at a low level. But the truth is, in many countries, tunnel workers come from the poorest, least educated parts of the population, sacrificed as if their lives were worth less. This is not very different from what happened in our countries centuries ago, when children and women were sent to dig tunnels, sacrificed for sewage, for water, or other infrastructure. Since we have already gone through this, we should be more aware. Instead, we conveniently forget. And today, countries are killing their young people just as we did in the past. I am simply saying: we have the tools to help them.
You mentioned living through extreme situations. Can you tell us what you have experienced? What have you seen? Who are the people you have met? Why is it important to go through these experiences to truly understand the underground world?
I think many people were surprised, perhaps in the last year, to discover that I work in disaster response, because it was never publicized. The truth is that disasters are something no one really wants to talk about. Especially underground disasters: cave-ins, flooding, poisonous gases… most of the time, people die.
My professional world is about learning from failure: that’s why I’m so passionate about training people properly. Most of the time, the designs are fine, the plans are good, but in reality things don’t happen as expected on site. And very often there is no feedback mechanism that says: “the rock isn’t behaving as expected, we need to rethink the design.”
Even worse, often contractors underestimate costs and timelines to win the job, and then later come to ask for more. So the workers feel the pressure, almost the obligation, to cut corners. And in our world, this often means death. I see it too often. For example, disasters in cross-passages—pure catastrophes because people refuse to accept that the design was not suited to the rock type. Or simple incompetence, where no one on the team really knows what they are doing.
There is a huge gap between designers, contractors, the intellectual side, and the workforce. My goal is to allow people in developing economies, often less educated, to have a minimum level of competence to make tunnels safer and allow them to work safely.
We talked about Saint Barbara but you also told me about other forms of devotion you have seen in Asia or India. What are these traditions and how do they change from country to country?
For thousands of years every culture has had a spiritual dimension, some form of reflection, an idol, a ritual. In Europe we have Saint Barbara’s Day, but it could really be called “Idol Day” because in every part of the world people stop for a moment to reflect before going underground. They don’t always reflect on Saint Barbara, but it’s the same idea.
In Scandinavia, for example, there are ancient ceremonies not only to celebrate entering a tunnel but also when reaching the deepest point. In China, at the highest-level nuclear test facility in the Gobi Desert, there was a Buddha statue at the entrance. In India, I saw temples dedicated to the local mountain god, represented by idols or symbols. In Australia we don’t just have Saint Barbara, we also have indigenous spirits. It is not uncommon to see both Saint Barbara and the local spirit at the entrance of a tunnel.
It’s as if people feel the need for humility underground, to be respectful rather than arrogant when entering. After all, we are a species that evolved climbing trees. It is natural that digging beneath our feet feels strange to us.
With water it is different: we move better there and we have friends among mammals. Underground we don’t. It is hostile: our lungs struggle, our chest feels pressure, rocks surround us, vision is limited, the temperature rises, we sweat. Psychologically, it is no surprise that demons and evil characters are often linked to the underground. Recognizing a unifying figure to whom we entrust our human fragility in such a hostile environment becomes almost a necessity.
How would you imagine the future of the professionals training right now? What do you wish for them, both professionally and personally?
May they be guided by technical mastery, professional integrity and a deep reverence for the humanity that has nurtured them and the environments they serve. I wish for them the courage to innovate with compassion, the humility to learn from every challenge, and the strength to stand firm in the face of adversity. Professionally, may they become stewards of integrity, competency and guardians of wellbeing; personally, may they find joy in connection, peace in reflection, and fulfillment in knowing their work uplifts others – we make the world an even better place.