Can Italy make itself more earthquake-proof?
ROME: Major earthquakes are an all too common event in Italy: over the past 50 years, there have been nine which have claimed almost 5,000 lives altogether, including around 250 this week.
The latest tragedy, in a remote mountain area about 150 km north-east of Rome, reopened a national debate on how the country can improve its resilience to tremors. After previous earthquakes, lax enforcement of building safety regulations was often blamed.
“Other seismic nations embarked on large-scale prevention programmes years ago, which have drastically reduced risks,” Enzo Boschi, a leading seismologist, said in a front-page editorial in ‘Il Messaggero’ newspaper.
Professor Gianpaolo Rosati, head of the civil engineering department at Milan’s Politecnico university, said retrofitting old buildings to make them quake-proof, even in medieval hamlets, was technically feasible, but very expensive.
“We have the right technology, the right skills and the right regulations for it, but the problem is that securing an old building can cost almost as much as reconstructing it from scratch, and private owners usually can’t foot the bill,” Rosati.
According to the ‘La Stampa’ newspaper, the cost hovers around 300 euros ($340) per square metre. The professor said the estimate was realistic, and compared it with the 500-euro-persquare-metre for building anew.
Rosati suggested a more pragmatic approach to conservation. “It is important to distinguish between old building stock with real historic value worth passing on to future generations, and buildings that are just old and decrepit and should be knocked down. We should have the courage to do it,” Rosati said.
According to a 2011 census by national statistics agency Istat, more than a third of private homes in Amatrice, Accumoli and Arquata delTronto — the three municipalities destroyed on Wednesday — are at least 100 years old.
The data was picked up by La Stampa, which also quoted an old radical proposal by Naples University Architecture Professor Aldo Loris Rossito knock down some 40 million low-grade homes built on the cheap during a 1945-1975 real estate boom.
Since 2009 — the year a major earthquake killed 309 in L’Aquila — all new builds in Italy have to be quake resistant, and existing buildings have to be tested for solidity. Rosati said only key public infrastructure like schools and hospitals have so far been checked.
Much remains to be done, as exemplified by the collapse of an elementary school and a hospital in Amatrice. But nearby Norcia, rebuilt after quakes in 1979 and 1997, offers a positive example: its buildings resisted the latest quake and no one was hurt.
Professor Franco Braga, head of the Italian National Association of Seismic Engineering, said in a statement that buildings should by law be graded according to their quake resistance, just like electric appliances are graded for energy efficiency.
The government could support the costly exercise through tax breaks, Braga suggested, adding that avoiding the issue “has cost the country, counting from the 1976 earthquake in Friuli, between 100 to 200 billion euros in reconstruction costs.”