SA airways cancelling flights in March. Apparently they staged a flight through Milan and due to bad weather had passengers stuck in the terminal for 36 hours because they had no visas. Makes one wonder why they went there if the weather was that bad.
They have been staging through Milan [LIMC, I presume] since this started in November and, mostly, it has all gone well. As I understand it, at the time of night and the geographic position that SAA would like to make a tech stop, Milan is the only place that is open and without noise restrictions.
It should be no surprise that many airlines are shouting now - irrespective of the agreement made. They want to be able to show their newspaper clippings to the boys in The City and their small shareholders to show that they kicked up a fuss about it. My guess is that the alternative fuel uplift plan that was agreed, NEVER imagined that they would lose 30% of supply for a year (or more).
Typically, these plans would be about a couple of weeks whilst some emergency work was done. I would lay a small bet that, losing the whole storage facility would not have been planned for.