Explosives expert nicknamed ‘Mr Dynamite’ to help clean up Italian forests flattened by cyclone

Forests in Italy that were devastated by a cyclone last year are to be cleared by an explosives expert nicknamed Mr Dynamite.

Vaste swathes of forest in Italy’s north were flattened by the cyclone last October, with the fallen timber blocking roads and farm tracks and impeding the regrowth of young trees.

The powerful storm affected woodland from Lombardy in the west to the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia in the east.

Danilo Coppe, who was involved in demolishing the remains of the Morandi bridge in Genoa after it collapsed last year, is now working on a plan to use thousands of small charges to blow up giant tree stumps and tangled piles of debris.

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The aim is to accelerate the rate at which the stumps would normally decompose.

Often located in remote areas, it would be too costly and difficult to remove them with machines.

Tree trunks are already being harvested as timber, with much of the wood bought up by China, but the stumps are much tougher to shift.

“We will do in two years what nature would achieve in a century,” said Mr Coppe, who earned his nickname of Mr Dynamite from his expertise in using explosives.

He will carry out a series of test explosions next week in a larch and spruce forest near Asiago, in the northern region of Veneto.

If the tests go well, thousands of similar controlled explosions, using dynamite charges of 20-40 grams, will be carried out over the next two years.

“A team of three men can blow up more than 100 stumps a day,” Mr Coppe told La Repubblica newspaper.

“The effectiveness of the project is without doubt; the tests are just to work out how to do it on a large scale and to keep costs as low as possible,” Mr Coppe said.

But not everyone is thrilled with the idea of the forests ringing to the sound of dynamite explosions.

Emanuele Munari, the president of an association of mountain communities, said the technique should only be used in the most inaccessible terrain.

“I have concerns for the environmental impact and the fact that there could be residual traces of the dynamite left in the soil,” he said.

Mr Coppe played a key role in the demolition of Genoa’s Morandi bridge in June, nearly a year after it collapsed with the loss of 43 lives.

In a sophisticated operation, giant walls of water were shot up 150ft into the air just a second before bigger charges brought down the bridge’s massive remaining pylons.

As the water rained down on the exploding bridge, it served to dampen down the vast clouds of dust that would otherwise have choked large areas of the city as 40,000 tonnes of concrete and metal crashed to the ground.

The old bridge is to be replaced by a new €200 million structure designed by the architect Renzo Piano. It is scheduled to be completed next year.