Cheap cement ‘blamed for quake toll’

– Shoddy, price-cutting renovations in breach of local building regulations could be partly to blame for the high death toll from this week's devastating earthquake in central Italy, according to a prosecutor investigating the disaster.

As questions mount over the deaths of nearly 300 people, prosecutor Giuseppe Saieva indicated that property owners who commissioned suspected sub-standard work could be held responsible for contributing to the quake’s deadly impact.

Saieva said the tragedy could not simply be filed away as an unavoidable natural disaster. “If the buildings had been constructed as they are in Japan, they wouldn’t have collapsed,” he told La Repubblica.

Within hours of the quake hitting on Wednesday, Saieva was in Amatrice, the small mountain town hit hardest by the quake. He inspected the damage there before opening a preliminary investigation for possible culpable homicide and causing a disaster.

The crushed partition walls of a collapsed three-storey villa was likely “built on the cheap with more sand than cement”, he said.

Engineering and architectural experts have highlighted the widespread use of cheap cement beams for house extensions and renovations as a possible reason so many buildings collapsed. Heavy and inflexible, the cement beams become deadly if released by shaking because they crush older walls beneath them. – AFP