Experts face jail for failing to predict quake
‘Inept analysis’ blamed in Italian deaths
Prosecutors in Italy have called for a group of scientists to be jailed for four years each for allegedly failing to give adequate warning of the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009 that killed 309 people and injured hundreds more.
The manslaughter trial of the seven experts has proved immensely controversial, with the international scientific community saying that earthquakes cannot be predicted and that the experts are being made scapegoats for an unforeseen natural disaster.
Critics say that by playing down the risks, the scientists consigned hundreds of people to their deaths when the quake struck at 3:32 a.m. on April 6, 2009, reducing to dust centuries-old buildings as well as modern apartment blocks.
In calling for the jail sen- tences, prosecutors accused the experts of offering “an incomplete, inept, unsuitable and criminally mistaken analysis” of the dozens of tremors that rattled the mountain city in the days before the 6.3 magnitude earthquake. The geologists and volcanologists were members of a special committee on natural disasters that held an emergency meeting in L’Aquila six days before the city and surrounding villages were devastated.
They ruled that it was impossible to determine whether the tremors would be followed by a large quake, in a judgment that reassured residents.
Their advice was described by Fabio Picuti, a prosecutor, as “banal, useless, self-contradictory and mistaken.”
The court heard that Enzo Boschi, a member of the panel and a former director of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, allegedly told concerned residents: “I would reject (the possibility) of an earthquake.”
Picuti said: “People died because of this phrase.”
It is claimed that clearer information would have allowed the inhabitants of the city, the capital of the Abruzzo region, to evaluate the threat and decide whether to evacuate.
After the main earthquake struck, L’Aquila was shaken by 250 powerful aftershocks within 48 hours.
The trial started in September last year and is expected to finish next month. Defence lawyers will present their final arguments on Oct 9 and 10.
Scientists around the world have criticized the trial as unjust, saying that current technology does not allow the prediction of quakes.
Last year, more than 5,000 scientists sent an open letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, criticizing the trial. The American Association for the Advancement of Science also expressed its concern over the trial, saying that the charges had “no merit.”
“The charges against these scientists are both unfair and naive,” the association said in the letter to Napolitano. “It was mistaken to think that the scientists could have alerted the people of L’Aquila to the possibility of an earthquake,” the association said.
“There is no way they could have done that credibly.”