Dave Rothery, a Senior Lecturer in the OU Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, examines whether the Italian Government could have been better prepared for the recent L’Aquila earthquake.
Now that the drama of the L’Aquila earthquake is losing its immediacy, some media outlets are shifting their attention to recrimination, having discovered that last month the Italian civil protection agency silenced Giampaolo Giuliani who had been raising alarm among residents of the area on the grounds of an increase in the amount of radon gas in the soil.
So, was this earthquake predicted, and what should the authorities have done?
My first comment is that prediction is easy with hindsight. With the aid of hindsight it can be seen that increased radon (leaking up from fractured rock at depth) was heralding this earthquake, and that various smaller earthquakes in the previous weeks were foreshocks to the main event. The trouble is that foreshocks don’t usually happen and cannot be recognised as foreshocks until the bigger earthquake happens. More often, a big earthquake happens suddenly, and is followed by a series of smaller earthquakes known as aftershocks. From the perspective of March, it would have been reasonable to interpret the increased soil radon as associated with the small earthquakes that were already happening, and to anticipate that activity would subside.
No win situation
In this case, the civil protection agency made a ‘wrong call’, but a perfectly excusable one. Moreover, consider this. Suppose they had concluded, in late March, that there was a 50 per cent chance of a major earthquake somewhere in an area the size of Lincolnshire. What should ‘they’ have done? Told hundreds of thousands of people to sleep outdoors for a month? Advised them (or forced them?) to evacuate the province. What would that have cost, and what would the repercussions have been if a major earthquake had then not happened?
Predicting earthquakes for civil protection purposes is usually a ‘no win’ situation. What can be done and in fact is done in earthquake-prone regions of Italy is to drill school children on what to do if they feel an earthquake (dive under the nearest table). Also construction codes to make buildings earthquake resistant should be enforced. The situation in that respect gives less reason for complacency. Not just in Italy but pretty much worldwide schools and other public buildings are built on the cheap, and inspectors can be under pressure to turn a blind eye. I wait to learn how many new school buildings fell down this time, and I’m glad that this earthquake happened when the schools were empty.
I have been in the company of half a dozen Italian colleagues at a meeting in the Netherlands for the past two days. Many of them felt foreshocks over the past few weeks, and several of them felt (of have spouses who felt) yesterday’s earthquake. Not one of them is blaming the government for what happened. They accept that parts of their country are at risk from earthquakes, and that (generally speaking) buildings that have stood since the Rennaissance cannot be made earthquake proof. But hey, they survived for several hundred years, so that’s not bad. Two hundred-plus deaths is a tragedy, but provided that the relief effort is swift and appropriate, the authorities have done their job. That seems reasonable to me.
A little perspective. In 2006 and 2007 about 3,000 people died each year in road accidents in the UK, and it was probably about 5,000 in Italy.
Dave Rothery, a Senior Lecturer in the OU Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and chairs the level 1 Science Short Course S186 Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Tsunamis, where issues of hazard prediction and hazard mitigation are examined.
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