In February 2010, an 8.8 magnitude earthquake shook Chile's captial, Santiago, for more than a minute and a half. More than 50 aftershocks were recorded.
Credit: AFP
SINISTER RUMBLINGS from several hundred small earthquakes had the town of L'Aquila on edge. And yet the experts were reassuring: stay home, sure, have a glass of wine, they said. Then a big - 6.3 magnitude - earthquake hit, killing 309 people. Who is to blame?
The Italian city's legal system say responsibility lies with Enzo Boschi, the president of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, and six colleagues - scientists and a civil official. Charged with manslaughter, the trial of the seven began in October this year and looks set to continue, as legal and scientific experts wrangle with the facts and the legal culpability for those killed when the earthquake damaged the northern Italian town on 6 April 2009.
Six days previously, this expert group met to discuss a series of mild to moderate earthquakes that for four months had rattled the medieval university town. They also discussed the troubling consequences of 'predictions' being posted on a website by L'Aquila resident Giampaolo Giuliani, an ex-technician at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory. Giuliani claimed he could predict earthquakes based on fluctuations in
emissions of radon gas. Although he had never published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, Giuliani believed that the radon anomalies, measured using sensors of his own design, warned of a major earthquake.
In addition to Boschi, the group that met that day included a physics professor, Claudio Eva from Genoa University in northern Italy; volcanologist Franco Barberi from the University of Rome (Roma Tre); Mauro Dolce, head of the seismic-risk office at Rome's National Department of Civil Protection; Giulio Selvaggi, director of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) National Earthquake Centre; and Gian Michele Calvi, president of the European Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering in Pavia. It also included government official Bernardo De Bernardinis. If anyone could tell the people of L'Aquila what these seismic rumblings presaged, they could.
What they said was, based on this kind of seismic pattern, a large earthquake in L'Aquila was "improbable". In words he must surely regret now, De Bernardinis, then vice president of Italy's Civil Protection Department, told media that residents could stay at home and relax
with a glass of wine - "Absolutely, absolutely, a Montepulciano doc," he said, referring to a renowned red.
Then the earthquake struck.
"We simply want justice," L'Aquila prosecutor, Alfredo Rossini, told reporters in September. The group are charged with giving overly reassuring information to L'Aquila residents. Prosecutors are asking for A$68 million (US$71.3 million) in damages.
When it was announced in May, the trial drew condemnation from scientists worldwide. The INGV published an open letter to Italian president Giorgio Napolitano, signed by over 5,000 scientists, including over 70 from Australia. It urged the Italian government "to be proactive in establishing and carrying out local and national programs to support earthquake preparedness and risk mitigation rather than prosecuting scientists for failing to do something they cannot do yet - predict earthquakes."
"This is a trial which opens on very shaky foundations. You cannot put science on trial," Alfredo Biondi, Eva's lawyer, told Agence France-Presse at the start of the trial. The prosecution argues the trial is about
the communication of risk. The city of L'Aquila has accused the group "of having provided an approximative, generic and ineffective assessment of seismic activity risks as well as incomplete, imprecise and contradictory information."
"The case raises important questions about risk assessment in earthquakes," says Thomas Jordan, chair of the International Commission on Earthquake Forecasting, which reviewed the L'Aquila events in a report released in May. It emphasises that the way seismologists communicate earthquake risk must change, he pointed out in September in a special issue of the British journal Nature on the case.
"Can we predict earthquakes? The answer is no," says Jordan, the director of the Southern California Earthquake Centre and a seismologist at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
"Many of the big earthquakes have happened in places where we didn't expect earthquakes: Christchurch, Haiti, Sichuan in China - all of which were very destructive - were not considered very likely places to have earthquakes. Frankly, they were considered unlikely," Jordan tells me from the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics conference in Melbourne in June. "We are still surprised by where earthquakes occur and we still need to know more about the structure of faults at the surface but also in the interior of plates."
Earthquakes
And if they issue a warning and people panic and get killed will they be charged with manslaughter for that?
the worlds gone mad
I repeat the worlds gone mad. No amount of education will help.
Shaky Ground
I am a retired meteorologist who had many years as an operation weather forecaster and in later years had responsibility for weather forecasting services nationwide. We had many discussions and debates on the nature of responsibility, and used the concept of "duty of care". A person preparing and issuing forecasts and warnings has the reponsibility to exercise their highest level of professionalism within the limitations of available science and technology. Obviously, over time, there were major improvements in science, technology and practice. A forecaster who does not exercise a duty of care should be called to account.