So what, exactly, would residents have done if they hadn't received “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” about the risk of an earthquake? L'Aquila is a city of almost 75,000 people, would they have all decamped from their homes and gone out into the countryside to live in tents, and for how long, a week, a month, a year, waiting for an earthquake that might have never come? What's next, convicting meterologists of manslaughter when they fail to predict flooding or blizzards that kill people who don't evacuate?In a verdict that sent shock waves through the scientific community, an Italian court convicted seven experts of manslaughter for failing to adequately warn residents of the risk before an earthquake struck central Italy in 2009, killing more than 300 people.
The defendants, all prominent scientists or geological and disaster experts, were sentenced on Monday to six years in prison.
Earthquake experts worldwide decried the trial as ridiculous, contending there was no way of knowing that a flurry of tremors would lead to a deadly quake.
“It’s a sad day for science,” said seismologist Susan Hough, of the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, Calif. That fellow seismic experts in Italy were singled out in the case “hits you in the gut,” she said.
In Italy, convictions aren’t definitive until after at least one appeal, so it was unlikely any of the defendants would face jail immediately.
Italian officials and experts have been prosecuted for quake-triggered damage in the past, including a 2002 school collapse in southern Italy that killed 27 children and a teacher. But that case centred on allegations of shoddy construction in quake-prone areas.
Among those convicted Monday were some of Italy’s best known and most internationally respected seismologists and geological experts, including Enzo Boschi, former head of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.
“I am dejected, desperate,” Mr. Boschi said. “I thought I would have been acquitted. I still don’t understand what I was convicted of.”
The trial began in September, 2011, in this Apennine town, whose devastated historic centre is still largely deserted.
The defendants were accused of giving “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” about whether small tremors felt by L’Aquila residents in the weeks and months before the April 6, 2009, quake should have been grounds for a warning.
The 6.3-magnitude earthquake killed 308 people in and around the medieval town and forced survivors to live in tent camps for months.
Many much smaller tremors had rattled the area in the previous months, causing frightened people to wonder if they should evacuate.
“I consider myself innocent before God and men,” said another convicted defendant, Bernardo De Bernardinis, a former official of the national Civil Protection Agency.
Prosecutors had sought convictions and four-year sentences during the trial. They argued that the L’Aquila disaster was tantamount to “monumental negligence,” and cited the devastation wrought in 2005 when levees failed to protect New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
This ruling is all the more galling to me because there has been next to no effort put into investigating how so many modern buidings, which should have been built to earthquake-resistant standard, were destroyed by the quake. It is obvious that corners were cut (and the resulting savings pocketed by someone along the way) but yet we hear nothing about those who are responsible for the deaths of hundreds in collapsed buildings being brought to justice. And the reconstruction effort has been rife with corruption as well, with who knows how much money siphoned off, but of course that is being treated like business as usual. Meanwhile a group of scientists doing their best to communicate an inexact science to the public are nailed to the cross.
