High-Stakes Seismology

May 27, 2011 3:26 PM

In a chilling development, six Italian scientists (and one government official) are facing manslaughter charges for failing to predict the April 6, 2009 earthquake that killed 309 people.
posted by Betelgeuse (45 comments total)

And they are not bringing charges against psychics?
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 3:29 PM on May 27, 2011 [6 favorites]

If I were a seismic scientist in Italy, I would put up a permanent "There is risk of an earthquake happening today" sign.
posted by benito.strauss at 3:33 PM on May 27, 2011 [5 favorites]

If I were a seismic scientist in Italy, I would put up a permanent "There is risk of an earthquake happening today" sign.

Even better, come up with an Earthquake Threat Level scale, and always keep it at Orange or above.
posted by burnmp3s at 3:37 PM on May 27, 2011 [42 favorites]

Ridiculous. The earth's fault lines, like the weather, are a chaotic system. They are by their nature unpredictable.
posted by empath at 3:37 PM on May 27, 2011

Let's go burn down the observatory so this will never happen again!
posted by Johnny Assay at 3:39 PM on May 27, 2011 [30 favorites]

Italy? I'm not surprised. I always seem to be reading something like this out of that area. It's like the Texas of Europe.
posted by Malice at 3:40 PM on May 27, 2011 [27 favorites]

For some reason this reminds me of Italian prosecutors charging the race car designer and team officials with manslaughter for driver Ayrton Senna's death in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.
posted by clorox at 3:40 PM on May 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

It seems they've opted for a trial rather than the committee of inquiry that would naturally follow such an event. (You want to work out whether the public were told the right thing at the right time and whether the public were capable of understanding what they were told and so on. Clearly a chunk of the public (and the prosecutor) don't understand that you can't predict earthquakes.) Is there some weird quirk of Italian law, government or culture that makes this the natural choice?
posted by hoyland at 3:44 PM on May 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

This is The Onion, right? It is, right? RIGHT?

Ho. Ly. Shit. Human beings really do terrify me sometimes.
posted by Decani at 3:47 PM on May 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

I think the framing of the FPP is somewhat misleading.

This may or may not actually be the case, but the prosecutors are going after the scientists that were on a panel charged with assessing quake risks, who allegedly said that there was NO risk. Furthermore, they allege the panel withheld information about which buildings specifically were higher risk of failure than others.

In the US if a bunch of engineers did this, you bet they'd be brought up on charges, too.
posted by chimaera at 3:50 PM on May 27, 2011 [10 favorites]

Wasn't there a guy who did predict the quake, and then got in legal trouble for it because people thought he was spreading panic?

Anyway, it's not always totally unpredictable. There were was unusual heat above the the faults before the latest Japan quake.
posted by delmoi at 3:50 PM on May 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Failure to predict an earthquake != claiming there is no risk of a quake and then one happens. Not claiming this is true, but that's what they're up on charges for.
posted by chimaera at 3:52 PM on May 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

I am a primatologist, though IANYP. I want to warn you that there is a non-zero chance that monkeys will cause your death.
posted by ChuraChura at 3:53 PM on May 27, 2011 [41 favorites]

But ... I've always wanted my own primatologist!

In other news, "the prosecutor acknowledged that the committee members had no way of predicting the earthquake, but he accused them of translating their scientific uncertainty into an overly optimistic message."

That's quite different from charging them with failing to predict a quake.
posted by cyndigo at 4:20 PM on May 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

But wait...isn't it really the Earth's *fault*?

ducks
posted by Lutoslawski at 4:21 PM on May 27, 2011 [15 favorites]

I think the framing of the FPP is somewhat misleading.

OK. Point taken.

This may or may not actually be the case, but the prosecutors are going after the scientists that were on a panel charged with assessing quake risks, who allegedly said that there was NO risk. Furthermore, they allege the panel withheld information about which buildings specifically were higher risk of failure than others.

But the scientists didn't claim there was NO risk. A government official spun the scientific results to say there was "no" risk. This happens [i]all the time[/i] in science as we try to make science palatable for the public. Really good science communicators figure out how to communicate the science without getting it wrong. Not-as-good communicators can often oversimplify or get it wrong.

If you want to prosecute someone, you could consider prosecuting the government official, but even that I think is unreasonable. But to prosecute the scientists for making an honest assessment of risk based on the best-available data and physical models is lunacy.

In the US if a bunch of engineers did this, you bet they'd be brought up on charges, too.

This is totally a straw man. The engineers designed and built this theoretical structure that collapsed. Seismologists didn't design or build the Earth.

Failure to predict an earthquake != claiming there is no risk of a quake and then one happens. Not claiming this is true, but that's what they're up on charges for.

Even if you thought that people should be liable for saying stuff like this, blaming the scientists is just crazy.
posted by Betelgeuse at 4:24 PM on May 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

chimaera: The one who said there was "no danger" was a government official. None of the scientists made that claim in the meeting preceding that announcement: "The minutes of the 31 March meeting, though, reveal that at no point did any of the scientists say that there was 'no danger' of a big quake."
posted by Serf at 4:25 PM on May 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

I say, burn them as witches! Burn them!

If they got it right: witches!

If they missed the magical signs: bad witches!

Seems pretty obvious to me.
posted by clvrmnky at 4:39 PM on May 27, 2011

The one who said there was "no danger" was a government official. None of the scientists made that claim in the meeting preceding that announcement:

In that case, the government official is the one who needs to go up on charges and the scientists shouldn't have been brought into it at all.
posted by chimaera at 5:00 PM on May 27, 2011

If a local marine expert informed me that the coastal waters in his area are known to not contain sharks when they are, in fact, well-known to contain an abundance of sharks by the scientific community, then there should be consequences for that misinformation.

The irresponsible use of scientific credentials is serious. Manslaughter is probably too harsh a charge. Let's bring a law student into the thread to speak to that. But at the very least they should be stripped of their credentials.
posted by stroke_count at 5:02 PM on May 27, 2011

Well, let's try to give some details on this not entirely well reported mess.

The Great Risks Committee, part of the Department for Civil protection, acts a a technical-scientific consultant; it was convened in the city of L'Aquila so as "to inform the cizitens living in region abruzzo with all the information available to the scientific community regarding the seismic events that have occourred in the last weeks".

The judge has found that the risk evaluation was done superficial, generic and ineffective; the judge has quoted some of the statements that were recorded in the minutes of the meeting:

"it is not possible to predict earthquakes" , "it is extremely difficult to predict the evolution of seismic events", "the mere observation of many small quakes doesn't constitute a precursor". The judge finds that the exact opposite was also states, that is that "no prediction has a scientific foundation". Furthermore, the judged has quoted the following statements:

"strong earthquakes in the Abruzzo region have a rather long return period. The short term risk of having a strong quake, similar to the one that has happened in 1793, is unlikely" (note: that's not a sloppy translation, it's the language that was used, the short term risk is unlikely)

that the seismic events sequence that had been affecting l'Aquila for roughly three monts was a normal geological event, that is to be considered as part "of the normal phenomenology, certainly normal from the point of view of the seismics events that are to be expected in this type of terriories, that is centered around the Abruzzo region, but that has struck a little bit
the Lazio region, a little bit the Marche region as well, obscillating in Central Italy"

that to the present day, there is no risk, that the situation is favourable as a continuous energy discharge is ongoing "there is no danger, I said (note: De Bernadinis' statement) to Sulmon Major, the scientific community keeps on confirming that it's a favourable situation therefore a continuous energy discharge, and so substantially there were also some rather intense events, not very intense, so somehow we have witnessed few damages" (note: again, no sloppy translation, I have tried to keep the translation as literal as possible, without trying to convey a particular meaning or not to convery it).


The complete ruling is 224 pages long, a tad too much to translate.


Imho, the key statement here is the one in which it was stated that "there is no danger" because of the ongoing continuous discharge of energy (sequence of small events):


"there is no reason for one to state that a sequence of low magnitude quakes could be considered a strong earthquake precursor" and "the quakes registrations (note:seismograms) are characterized by strong acceleration peaks, but with quite contained spectral shifts, that is of a few millimeters, and therefore damages are to be expect on those structures
which are more sensible to accelleration"

Actually this statement is not in the minutes of the meeting, but was made in an interview by the Vice Manager of the Department of Civil Protection. Mr. De Bernardinis.

The judge also finds that there is no evident trace of dissent in the minutes of the Great Risks Committee session, hence because of the nature of the statements it was difficult to ascertiain wheter there was any risk increase.

The judge makes it quite clear that the scientific method isn't under, let' say, attack...but rather finds that the commission has done a quite sloppy job of informing the policy makers, and that there are some staggering contradictions in the minutes.

It's quite a mess, as it is possible that the minutes synthetized the statements too much, but as they were underwritten by the people who had took part in the committee, that implies that the statements were approved by the underwriting parties. They may as well have refused, or may have challenged the language of the minutes.
posted by elpapacito at 5:06 PM on May 27, 2011 [10 favorites]

In the US if a bunch of engineers did this, you bet they'd be brought up on charges, too.

This is totally a straw man. The engineers designed and built this theoretical structure that collapsed. Seismologists didn't design or build the Earth.

Yeah, you'd be wanting an astrophysical engineer for that.

I don't think the building codes for planets requires a designer to sign off on the plans though, so we might not have had one for Earth.
posted by yohko at 5:49 PM on May 27, 2011

Thanks for the translation, elpapacito.

Having taken minutes for very technical meetings, I can't say I have great faith in their accuracy unless transcribed from a recording device.

It sounds like they may have been using 1793 as a precident of "strong quake"... but is there seismological data from 1793?

The biggest problem here is that the scientists were asked to do a very difficult thing that the data did not allow, and failed at explaining that. Seems like they were trying to say, "as far as we can tell, there's no more danger than there usually is," which is not to say the observable risk is zero, but that the change in the observable risk is zero.
posted by zennie at 5:52 PM on May 27, 2011

Wasn't there a guy who did predict the quake, and then got in legal trouble for it because people thought he was spreading panic?^

Yep. Clearly, there was political pressure to declare things to be safe. You can't call the police on a guy who predicts an earthquake, and then sue seismologists for not wanting to come out and say there might be an earthquake; you cannot have it both ways. Except, of course, that the prosecution here clearly does want it both ways.

But, in fact, this kind of warning doesn't exist in a vacuum. Even with volcanoes - where you actually can make predictions with some success - there is a lot of pressure on scientists not to call a warning unnecessarily, or too soon. Issuing a warning for any kind of natural disaster can cause people to flee the area, and (importantly for a town like L'Aquila) it keeps the tourists away. Tourists = money. You don't want to drive the tourists away unless you have a good reason, and people who depend on tourists for their income get mad when warnings keep their tourists away and then turn out to be wrong.

So, were the warnings of the seismologists too cautious? In my opinion as a seismologist. . . eh, maybe? One earthquake does, in the short term, raise the risk of another earthquake. It's like the "tomorrow's weather will be like today's" algorithm of predicting the weather. But still, the absolute short-term risk is still low. They could have said something like, "look, there's going to be another damaging earthquake here sometime. The odds of it being tomorrow are really small, but there's always a chance. The chance is increased by this earthquake swarm. But only a tiny bit. There probably won't be an earthquake. But there could be." And that's really the strongest thing you can say. It's not very meaningful at all, because we just don't know any more than that.

Obviously, the government felt like a small, really unclear, maybe increased risk of an earthquake wasn't worth upsetting their local economy over. But then the earthquake happened, and now they want someone to pay for it. I find it very disturbing.
posted by mandanza at 6:03 PM on May 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

And yet it moves.
posted by SPrintF at 6:18 PM on May 27, 2011

Time to shift the blame from only 7, add the writers of the building codes, also add the building inspectors, that would be more sane in blaming the timing of an earthquake killing citizens. anyone in a position of predicting natural events, should approach the public like the politicans, namely vague and no direct answers to any questions.
posted by taxpayer at 6:31 PM on May 27, 2011

It sounds like they may have been using 1793 as a precident of "strong quake"... but is there seismological data from 1793?

I think these are historical records; the oldest known one , according to wikipedia, dates back to 1315. Yet the region is know to be interested by a rather frequent seismic activity and at times by rather strong quakes, and has been mapped as a danger zone for quite a long time (if my memoy serves, it's measured in dozen of years, I don't have a reference handy).

But after all, most of Italy can be considered a danger zone for seismic activity, and that is a well known solid fact. Yet as strong quakes are a relatively rare occourrence, people tend to underevalutate the danger as they, imho, tend to estimate risk according to the consequences of the seismic events they can recall and have experienced directly.

Consider also that most of the buildings in Italy weren't conceived by following some sensible anti-seismic standard or any at all, so we have a stock of buildings that probably wouldn't stand a strong earthquake well; yet zoning an area as dangerous and forcing builders to adopt relatively expensive anti-seismic measures is presently a political no-no, as there are some rather strong lobbies that has been working for many years so as to obtain advantageous zoning (for instance, some builder buy areas that are zoned as agricultural, and then they lobby hard (read:corrupt) politicians to rezone as residential area, thus saving billions through buying cheap agricultural areas).

So it's rather easy to blame scientist or to use the fact that, presentely, no one has found a method to consistenly predict earthquakes with accuracy, as _evidence_ that the risk is low. Common sense would suggest exactly the opposite, that is that enforcing anti-seismic construction code is a necessity in an country that, as a whole, is very likely to be struck by strong quakes.
posted by elpapacito at 6:42 PM on May 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Anyway, it's not always totally unpredictable. There were was unusual heat above the the faults before the latest Japan quake

Yes delmoi, and that guy is Giuliani and was working on radon, on the quantity that is emitted before an earthquake, through measurements made, if my memory serves, by a small scale network of measuring devices (radometers) that he was running.

According to The Guardian

In 2003, Giuliani submitted a request to the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology for project funding, to study radon gas emissions as a possible predictor for earthquakes, using one or more radometers of his own design. He met both Bosci and Guido Bertolaso, the head of the government's interior ministry, but his proposal was rejected on the grounds it was not sufficiently scientific.

This judgment must have taken into account previous radon studies, carried out amid widespread attempts to find a reliable earthquake predictor. The Japanese, Americans, Russians and Chinese, as well as the Italians, had all tried different kinds of radometers and procedures, but failed to get definitive or consistent results. And, according to a later statement by Dr Bosci's deputy, Dr Walter Mazzochi: "The things Giuliani has presented are at a very low level, from a scientific point of view. I didn't see any evidence that the method could work."

Interestingly, i see on wikipedia that "In December 2009, Giuliani presented his research, without many important details, to the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco; the union subsequently invited him to take part in developing a worldwide seismic early warning system"

what's interesting is the alleged omission of details..

And indeed your link to the anomalous heat realease is quite interesting

They say that before the M9 earthquake, the total electron content of the ionosphere increased dramatically over the epicentre, reaching a maximum three days before the quake struck.

At the same time, satellite observations showed a big increase in infrared emissions from above the epicentre, which peaked in the hours before the quake. In other words, the atmosphere was heating up.

These kinds of observations are consistent with an idea called the Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling mechanism. The thinking is that in the days before an earthquake, the great stresses in a fault as it is about to give cause the releases large amounts of radon.

posted by elpapacito at 7:13 PM on May 27, 2011

Weathermen are next!
posted by BlueHorse at 7:33 PM on May 27, 2011

The earth's fault lines, like the weather, are a chaotic system. They are by their nature unpredictable.

Italians, like the weather, are a chaotic system. They are by their nature unpredictable.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 8:20 PM on May 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

chimaera: “I think the framing of the FPP is somewhat misleading. This may or may not actually be the case, but the prosecutors are going after the scientists that were on a panel charged with assessing quake risks, who allegedly said that there was NO risk. Furthermore, they allege the panel withheld information about which buildings specifically were higher risk of failure than others. In the US if a bunch of engineers did this, you bet they'd be brought up on charges, too.”

Manslaughter charges? Misconduct, maybe – although please note that the article says that the panel actually probably never made the alleged statement of no risk at all, only politicians did – but if this happened in the US, nobody would be charged with the actual manslaughter of hundreds. And if they were, it would be wrong.
posted by koeselitz at 8:38 PM on May 27, 2011

Also, this seems sort of simple to me. Hundreds of people died because buildings in Italy are poorly built to withstand earthquakes. Buildings in Italy are poorly built to withstand earthquakes because it's a whole society built on residual income that leaks out of most monetary transactions via extralegal economic activity. That extralegal economic activity continues without being questioned because many powerful Italian politicians have a vested interest in seeing it continue, and have no interest whatsoever in the kind of regulation that prepares for possible disasters in the future.

Blame science? Sure, science isn't really part of our business. Building is. Don't you dare touch that or suggest in any way that scrutiny or regulation is necessary. If you need to crucify someone to pacify the mobs, string up some scientists.

Maybe someone who knows better – elpapacito, for instance – can correct me here; but that's really all I see.
posted by koeselitz at 8:45 PM on May 27, 2011

And they are not bringing charges against psychics?

No, that would be silly. If anyone is to blame it's James Randi--he's the one who failed to debunk the psychics who failed to foretell that the scientists would fail to predict the earthquakes.
posted by GIFtheory at 8:45 PM on May 27, 2011

Italy is a mess. It's illuminating to point out that Italy has had 61 governments since the end of World War II.

While not a true apples-to-apples comparison, the U.S. has had only 12 presidents in the same time span. The UK? Only 15, and two of them were repeats -- they served two separate, disconnected terms. France? 15 presidents, with two repeats.

Who the heck is driving the bus over there? Oh, that's right. It's still this guy.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:17 PM on May 27, 2011

How about doing a little bit more research before posting stuff? They are being sued because they were warned by specialists ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/05/laquila-earthquake-prediction-giampaolo-giuliani ) AND DID NOTHING. not even get their tents ready, IN THE MIDDLE OF A SERIES OF QUAKE IN A SEISMIC AREA.

And they did this a few months after vetting spend tond of money on avian flu medicine.
posted by 3mendo at 10:04 PM on May 27, 2011

( spending )
posted by 3mendo at 10:05 PM on May 27, 2011

3mendo: who is being sued? I thought they were charged with manslaughter. And I thought the people being charged were specialists.
posted by koeselitz at 10:07 PM on May 27, 2011

Instead, the sued the specialist for scaremongering. "failing to predict" is mentioned nowhere. Failing to react to warnings is what this is about.

And while you surely can't "predict" earthquakes, you can definitely estimate the probability of one happening given an area's seismic history.
posted by 3mendo at 10:09 PM on May 27, 2011

koeselitz: read the guardian link, i've been posting this all night all over the net and it's gotten tedious by now.
posted by 3mendo at 10:10 PM on May 27, 2011

Just imagine if the judge gets it wrong.
posted by benzenedream at 1:34 AM on May 28, 2011

Ops let me correct a mistake: the above mentioned quotes come from the indictement of the public prosecutor. The prosecutor makes it abundantly clear that the people charged with manslaughter are not charged as "scientist", but rather in their force of "people tasked to assess a risk" that were not asked to predict a quake, but rather to predict a risk.
posted by elpapacito at 3:48 AM on May 28, 2011

Props to elpapacito & 3mendo for properly explaining the actual situation.

Italy? I'm not surprised. I always seem to be reading something like this out of that area. It's like the Texas of Europe.

As someone who grew up in Texas, currently elects to live in Italy, & regularly sees how the English language press loves to cherry pick & badly translate their Italy beat, I cordially invite you to shove that precious little eponysterical statement up one of your orifices (shover's choice).
posted by romakimmy at 4:22 AM on May 28, 2011 [2 favorites]

Wait a minute, the trial is not against "scientists" in general, it's against members of a committee in the Civil Protection department, which is a government department. Some of those charged include top management level of the Civil Protection.

If you want to prosecute someone, you could consider prosecuting the government official,

Well, aren't members of a committee in the government's Civil Protection also "government officials" by definition?

I'm not saying there should be a sentence of manslaughter, just that the very premise for a trial is not really as wacky as "a trial against science". The motivations focus on communication to the public, public management of the evaluations made during that meeting, in short, about the public role, the job, of these public officials. See this summary on a scientific blog (google translated).

I see others have pointed this out already. I'll just add a few incidental notes for a bigger picture.

There weren't just complaints from other (independent) scientist who said they had been ignored, there were complaints also from local authorities about the management of warnings to the population - see this article (also google translated) on how the mayor had already asked for an emergency intervention before the earthquake, as there had been ongoing seismic activity for a while.

There was a lot of criticism in how the Civil Protection managed the situation post-earthquake as well. The then leader of the Civil Protection was a close ally of Berlusconi, who exploited the situation to make his typical self-aggrandizing promises and boasts.

And, because of the ongoing "animosity" Berlusconi has against the judicial system - of course he jumped on this too, even saying last year that he wasn't going to send the Civil Protection to Abruzzo anymore because due to the impending trial for manslaughter "someone could put a bullet through their head". He accused these judges of being politicised and of calling into question the whole work of the Civil Protection which according to him was blameless and perfect.

(Nevermind there was also a scandal later about corruption in reconstructions efforts. And nevermind the issue of buildings that were never made complaint to existing laws on security, responsibilities are much wider for that).
posted by bitteschoen at 5:25 AM on May 28, 2011

ps - I have not read the minutes of the meeting or details of the rulings, just stories in the press, and my understanding is what elpapacito quotes at the start of his comment, about the nature of that Committee working for the Civil Protection.

I cannot say if it was only a matter of political spinning during the conference of what had been said in that meeting. And, personally I'd much prefer the issues had been addressed politically rather than end up in court, but yeah, Italy.
posted by bitteschoen at 5:41 AM on May 28, 2011

"Ridiculous. The earth's fault lines, like the weather, are a chaotic system. They are by their nature unpredictable."
Chaotic systems can be predictable over shorter timescales but not long ones. Weather is obviously reasonably predictable over timescales of a few days.

Which is not to say that the situation isn't ridiculous.
posted by edd at 5:55 AM on May 28, 2011 [1 favorite]