Three years ago, a court in Italy set an extremely dangerous precedent. It convicted seven scientists of manslaughter and sentenced them each to six years in prison after a magnitude 6.3 earthquake killed 309 and injured 1,500 in L’Aquila.
Last week, justice finally prevailed when Italy’s supreme court overturned the convictions of six of the scientists and reduced the sentence of the seventh.
The researchers had been part of an advisory committee struck to analyze the likelihood of a major quake in light of hundreds of smaller ones in the region over several months.
The judge’s decision sent a chill through the entire scientific community. Earthquakes are notoriously difficult to predict. So much so that anyone who claims to be able to pinpoint the timing of one of these potentially devastating events is usually viewed as a quack or charlatan.
The whole thing smacked of scapegoating. It also threatened scientific inquiry. If one could be convicted for failing to predict the unpredictable, who in their right mind would ever sit on such an advisory panel again?
Of course it was not that simple. The judge, Marco Billi did not, in fact, convict them for failing to predict the quake, but for failing to “discharge their duties under the law.”
In Billi’s opinion, the conclusion the scientists came to, that there was no increased danger of a major event, was wrong. They should not have downplayed the risk by giving a neutral assessment.
Furthermore, Bernado De Bernardinis, who was deputy head of Italy’s civil protection department at the time, went one step further reassuring citizens they were safe saying the smaller quakes were actually “favourable because they discharged energy and therefore made a larger quake less likely.”
Saying such a thing was, in fact, kind of irresponsible. Although it may have been a hypothesis at one time and it certainly is something lay people sometimes repeat, but geologists have long-known it is way more complicated than that. The fact is, we simply don’t know whether they are releasing tension that may delay other quakes, are creating tension elsewhere that may lead to further quakes or are a precurser to other quakes.
For example, we know an aftershock can be bigger than an initial quake, but we can’t predict that any of these things are applicable on a case-by-case basis.
We also know that small quakes often occur before major quakes, but also after, almost like a chain reaction.
In any event, the magnitude scale for earthquakes is logarithmic. One point on the scale represents 40 times the power, so, event if you could claim smaller quakes are favourable because they discharge energy, you would need to have more than four billion magnitude 2 earthquakes to discharge the same amount of pressure the L’Aquila earthquake released.
It was poor judgment on De Bernardinis’ part to downplay the risk. Five supreme court justices upheld his conviction on that basis, but reduced his sentence to two years.
Some victims’ families are not happy about the decision and I understand the impulse to want to blame somebody and have them held accountable, but that in this case is misplaced vengeance.
The only blame lies with nature. There is always the risk of earthquakes in earthquake zones. Even if the scientists had come to the conclusion there was increased risk in this case, they could not have predicted precisely where and when the big one would occur.
What would residents had done if the conclusion was that there was a likelihood of a major quake sometime in the next 100 years, or even five or ten years? What would they have done if the scientists said six months and it happened 18 months later?
Justice has finally prevailed in this case. We have a long way to go before we will be able to predict earthquakes with any certainty.
