http://www.businessinsider.com/italian-seismologists-six-years-prison-2012-10

        drbuzz0 said:

If you want to assign blame for this tragety then I’ll tell you where to go, because indeed it was unnecessary.

The quake was a 6.4 on the Richter scale. That’s large, but not *that* big. Most modern cities in seismic areas are built so that they could sit on the epicenter of a 6.4 quake and there would be non-catastrophic damage and few deaths.

Unfortunately, this was an old city with a lot of old buildings. Still, old buildings can be retrofitted and reenforced.

There are techniques. Cables and steel frames can be attached within the buildings, rods can be driven through masonry, even dampers installed on foundations etc.

It’s expensive, however.

The problem here seems to be that the local authorities decided that it was too expensive or they didn’t want to risk the potential of disrupting historic structures.

If the goal is to prevent another tragedy like this, investigations need to focus on the failure of building codes.

It will always be a game of risk analysis versus budget. Like you said earlier, there’s an earthquke risk anywhere on the planet, it’s just extremely small in some areas and the probability drops away with magnitude for obvious reasons. Ultimately you assess, design and maintain construction based on certain assumptions for what is reasonable and the financial aspect will always be part of that. These decisions are made all the time.

I specc’ed up a modification for a set of nuclear reactors in France which would, undoubtedly, make them safer (I’m going to choose to leave this ambiguous for the sake of my career) and in the end, bit by bit my proposal was thrown out because it would have cost millions upon millions of euros. The cost-benefit analysis said no. At the end of the day it’s just plotted on a log-plot of cost against reduction-of-annual-risk-of-core-fusion. A couple of straight lines divide the proposals into high and low priority and those to be rejected. End of.

As for the Italy case, a lot of the case appears to me to hinge on the advice being given to ignore the minor quakes beforehand and stay indoors, drink a glass of wine and chill out. On another day it might have been good advice. One wonders what the overall societal cost of the stress and fear of over-conservative advice is on the wider population.

The quake was a 6.4 on the Richter scale. That’s large, but not *that* big. Most modern cities in seismic areas are built so that they could sit on the epicenter of a 6.4 quake and there would be non-catastrophic damage and few deaths.

Unfortunately, this was an old city with a lot of old buildings. Still, old buildings can be retrofitted and reenforced. There are techniques. Cables and steel frames can be attached within the buildings, rods can be driven through masonry, even dampers installed on foundations etc.

It’s expensive, however. The problem here seems to be that the local authorities decided that it was too expensive or they didn’t want to risk the potential of disrupting historic structures.

If the goal is to prevent another tragedy like this, investigations need to focus on the failure of building codes.

        Jason C said:

The question here then is, did the scientist give a reasonable qualifying statement/opinion about the chances of an earthquake? And if they did (and they did), under what circumstances of understanding did they give that opinion? I doubt they signed any piece of paper that had a criminal liability clause stating if their “opinion” was incorrect they would be held liable for any and all ensuing death and destruction. Nobody in their right mind would give an opinion under such a contractual condition or they would give an opinion so flaky like “I don’t know, it could happen anytime” so as to not be held liable.

Even then it doesn’t matter. This is the worse case of confirmation bias in jurisprudence I have ever heard or seen. The court is making so many unfounded assumptions that it is hard to see how they can justify any verdict at all.

        Mirko Tavosanis said:

The issue is well known:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_prediction#Seismic_activity

As for me, it does not seem unreasonable that if you actually say to people sleeping in tents that “you can go back to your homes because there is no risk”, when the risk actually exist according to current knowledge, then you can be sentenced for manslaughter when the quake hits.

From the Wiki article:
On March 29 he made a second prediction.[179] The details are hazy, but apparently he telephoned the mayor of the town of Sulmona, about 55 kilometers southeast of L’Aquila, to expect a “damaging” — or even “catastrophic” — earthquake within 6 to 24 hours. This is the incident with the loudspeaker vans warning the inhabitants of Sulmona (not L’Aquila) to evacuate, with consequential panic. Nothing ensued, except Giuliano was cited for procurato allarme (inciting public alarm) and injoined from making public predictions.

Well, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t! Lesson for scientists in Italy: keep your mouth shut when asked for a prediction.

        Mirko Tavosanis said:

No, actually they (or at least some of them, in some very visible occasions) stated that a larger quake was not a possibility.

No, the presence of foreshocks, even if it is not a reliable indicator of a quake, is a REALLY GOOD reason, anywhere, to presume that the risk is higher than normal.

I still think you’re playing a game of semantics and using the lack of definitive statements to uphold the court’s ruling.

Any scientist, a seismologist, a doctor, a structural engineer, a meteorologist, an economist – all will be called upon to give their opinion of future prediction. They don’t have crystal balls. They’re human and can make mistakes. When a doctor does his best during even during a routine surgery and complications happen and a patient dies, the doctor is not liable unless negligence can be proven.

The question here then is, did the scientist give a reasonable qualifying statement/opinion about the chances of an earthquake? And if they did (and they did), under what circumstances of understanding did they give that opinion? I doubt they signed any piece of paper that had a criminal liability clause stating if their “opinion” was incorrect they would be held liable for any and all ensuing death and destruction. Nobody in their right mind would give an opinion under such a contractual condition or they would give an opinion so flaky like “I don’t know, it could happen anytime” so as to not be held liable.

Where, if it does exist, was there any sort of legal understanding prior to “the deliverable” being submitted that this group of scientists agreed and stated they had any sort of reliable and tested method of predicting earthquakes? I bet it doesn’t exist. All of this points to is a case built on hearsay and scapegoating.

        drbuzz0 said:

Well, the risk is NEVER zero.

That’s true anywhere. Even in seismically inactive zones, the risk is not zero. Major quakes can and do sometimes occur on long dormant faults that are not known of or mapped. Anyone reading this could experience a quake in the next few minutes – the risk is not zero.

Yest. That’s why it is a particularly stupid thing to say “there is no risk” when you are standing in a known seismic zone in the midst of tremblors that could be, or could not be, foreshocks of a bigger quake.

This is not a Galileo-like scenario. Is more like the classical “Jaws” setting, with the mayor of the town encouraging everybody to go swimming because it’s a nice day.

Of course it would be foolish to do so. But this is not a on / off situation: quake risk takes many forms. In some seismic zones it is forbidden to build anything. In some, you have to follow special building guidelines. And in some cases, it is not a matter of having a policy for long-term risks: you have a situation of real-time emergency (pretty common in Italy: the last cycle of quakes in Northern Italy lasted for weeks, aftershocks killed rescuers in already damaged structures and damaged buildings even in my hometown, Pisa) and you have to take decisions on the spot. Is it reasonably safe to send people evaluating the damaged buildings, or is it best to wait for a while? People should be encouraged to leave the zone?

Of course, everybody knows that you can only do reasonable guesses in many of those situations. So, usually, in Italy or elsewere, nobody is prosecuted when rescuers are killed by unexpected aftershocks, or something of this kind. In the case of L’Aquila, instead, the Commission not only did a very disputable assessment of risk, but it made some spectacularly wrong statements. Some members actually said that there was “no risk”.

So, as to your original post:

“They never stated that a larger quake was not a possibility, but said it was “improbable” and that there was no reason to presume the risk was higher for 2009 than normal.”

No, actually they (or at least some of them, in some very visible occasions) stated that a larger quake was not a possibility.

No, the presence of foreshocks, even if it is not a reliable indicator of a quake, is a REALLY GOOD reason, anywhere, to presume that the risk is higher than normal.

Some other factual inaccuracies in the original post:

- the panic at L’Aquila was not caused by bogus quake predictions; it was caused by continuing foreshocks, and, in hindsight, this seems a very reasonable source of worry (of course, later, the bogus predictions stimulated the panic)

- the Italian government is not “turning against” its own scientists; the judiciary is not the government and it acts independently

        drbuzz0 said:

Alright, before we start on the wanton country bashing, the neutrino incident was actually an international effort and it turned out to be an error in an extremely complex system. The scientists, who I assure you, are very smart people, saw the results, scratched their heads and repeatedly tried to find the error. They did not find one so they released the data.

Others found the error.

The process worked.

These things happen. It’s why such surprising results are the subject of review and re-checked repeatedly.

I know that, but Italy is part of the EU-SSR, they are just a little bit more ahead than the reast of us.
I will go and carve my wrists up for a while…

        Mirko Tavosanis said:

As for me, it does not seem unreasonable that if you actually say to people sleeping in tents that “you can go back to your homes because there is no risk”, when the risk actually exist according to current knowledge, then you can be sentenced for manslaughter when the quake hits.

Well, the risk is NEVER zero. That’s true anywhere. Even in seismically inactive zones, the risk is not zero. Major quakes can and do sometimes occur on long dormant faults that are not known of or mapped. Anyone reading this could experience a quake in the next few minutes – the risk is not zero.

The question is relative risk. If you are going to say that any time there is a risk greater than zero, people must sleep in tents, then you will have everyone always sleeping in tents.

The region has earthquakes, but major quakes are infrequent. minor increases in seismic activity are frequent and rarely have any relationship to a major quake.