A seismologist's claim to have predicted Monday's earthquake has met with scepticism, but why, in a country used to seismic activity, has more not been done to limit potential damage? asks PADDY AGNEW in L'Aquila, Italy
IT WAS about 7.30pm on Monday when the earth started to move under our feet in L’Aquila – again. It was now 16 hours since the major earthquake which had claimed some 280 lives in and around L’Aquila that morning.
Nerves, however, were understandably still very raw. Even though we were outside the town, sheltering from the rain under the plastic awning of a filling-station bar, people panicked and rushed out into the street to get away from the building. Some people – those who had been there for the big one and lived to tell the tale – started to scream and cry.
To be fair, though, not everyone panicked. Many people – including the journalists and the curious who had flocked to L’Aquila – at first did not even realise that the slow, grinding, shuddering shake that came from the ground was actually a minor tremor. If you did not know any better, you might just think it was the sort of shudder that hits your window when a very heavy lorry drives past. But then, this was just an after-tremor.
Next morning, in a fourth-floor hotel room in Castel del Monte, high up on the Gran Sasso mountain, about 40km from L’Aquila, I had another minor taste of life with earthquakes. I was on the phone, doing a live radio piece, when the room began to shake. It did not last long but because I was on the fourth floor, the shaking and the swaying were disturbingly vivid.
This particular aftershock measured 5.1 on the Richter scale, which is serious enough and explains just why, notwithstanding our 40km distance from the earthquake’s epicentre and the fact that, as the night porter assured me, the hotel was built on a very solid rock foundation, you could still feel it. Which left me wondering about the truly terrifying experience that 30,000 or so Abruzzo inhabitants went through at 3.32am on Monday. If these are just earthquake “afterthoughts”, then most of us would be more than happy to skip the main dish.
ITALY HAS Along history of earthquakes. Put simply, this is a country where the earth moves – regularly and sickeningly. From 1693, when an estimated 153,000 people were killed in Sicily and Naples, through to 2002, when 29 people, including 26 small children, were killed in a schoolhouse collapse in San Giuliano di Puglia, Italian earthquakes have regularly made the wrong sort of headlines.
Seismologists claim that, since 1693, there have been at least 20 major earthquakes in Italy, not to mention hundreds of thousands of minor tremors. If you look at the website of the Italian Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (www.ingv.it), you will find that their experts list more than 70 seismic tremors in the L’Aquila region since April 1st.
On occasion, earthquakes have done horrifying damage in Italy – 86,000 dead in Sicily and Calabria in 1908, 32,000 dead at Avezzano (not far from L’Aquila) in 1915, and 2,735 dead in Campania (Naples) and Irpinia in 1980.
Geologists have no difficulty explaining just why Italy is so earthquake prone. It is all related to the overall movement of tectonic plates, and the fact that European and African plates have long been on a collision course. Add to that some well defined fault lines and you end up with a lot of seismic activity. Not for nothing, Italy still has two active volcanoes – Vesuvius, near Naples; and Etna, in Sicily – which also have a nasty habit of grabbing world headlines.
So, with all this underground activity around, how come Italy seems unable either to predict or prevent tragedies of this scale? Well, of course, here we are immediately into major polemics. One of the most controversial developments of this week concerned 62-year-old seismologist Gioacchino Giampaolo Giuliani, the L’Aquila-based expert who pointed out that his warnings of an imminent earthquake not only went unheeded but earned him a denuncia (judicial complaint) from the mayor of nearby Sulmona for having “alarmed the population”. (Giuliani’s prediction had been that the earthquake would strike not in L’Aquila but rather in Sulmona, about 70km away.) Giuliani claims that he has over the years developed a system that can predict earthquakes. Basically, he measures the amount of radon gas coming up through the earth. The more gas coming up, he argues, the more movement down below. Based on nine years of studies, he claims that if the radon gas levels suddenly shoot up, an earthquake will follow between six and 24 hours later.
For example, he claims that just prior to the San Giuliano quake in 2002, radon levels rose 100 times. Diagrams he released to news media this week show the levels rising dramatically at about 6pm on Sunday. Giuliani lives in Coppito, just outside L’Aquila. In tears on television this week, he said that he knew it was going to happen but he could do nothing to lessen the impact of the disaster. No one would listen. So, he moved out his family and saved them. His daughter opted to pass on his warnings, sending the following text to friends on Sunday: “Papa advises us not to sleep in L’Aquila tonight. Don’t ask me why . . . just trust him.”
Even the institute for which Giuliani works, the Nuclear Physics Institute of Gran Sasso, issued a statement a few days ago distancing itself from his “predictions” by saying that they were the fruit of his own “personal research” and nothing to do with the institute.
So was Giuliani just lucky? A majority of seismologists would say so, arguing that an early-warning system in relation to earthquakes is just about impossible. Alessandro Amato of the Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology pointed out this week that extensive seismic activity (called foreshocks) does not necessarily mean that a “big one” is on the way:
“Those sort of messages are practically useless. A swarm of small tremors are simply not enough to announce that a big quake is on the way. We record tremors all the time that lead to nothing. There is about a one-in-10,000 chance of being right.”
Enzo Boschi, head of the Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, put it even more succinctly this week when asked, for the umpteenth time, if this earthquake could have been predicted. “Every time there is an earthquake, there is always someone who claims to have predicted it. As far as I know, no one predicted this one with precision. It is simply not possible to predict earthquakes,” he said.
OF COURSE, THERE is always the exception that proves the rule. In 1975, authorities in Haicheng, China, ordered the evacuation of more than one million people after scientists had detected excessive seismic activity. The move was well timed. On February 4th, a massive earthquake, registering 7.3 on the Richter scale, hit the area. It was estimated that as many as 150,000 people would have lost their lives had they not been evacuated.
Yet, just when seismologists and geologists were ready to hail a vital breakthrough in the art of earthquake prediction, Mother Nature struck back with a cruel vengeance. One year later, in 1976, a massive quake just about wiped out the city of Tangshan, killing 250,000 people. The same scientists and the same technology that had predicted the Haicheng quake had failed totally to predict an even stronger one in Tangshan.
It would seem, then, that for the time being, and with all due respect to Giuliani, earthquake prediction remains a very inexact science. Which switches the onus of a country’s readiness from prediction to prevention. In other words, if you know that huge tracts of the national territory (perhaps more than 50 per cent) are potentially “seismic”, then the only thing to do is ensure that all houses are built to withstand earthquakes.
Which is clearly not the case in Italy, where at least 70 per cent of houses were built long before the 1974 legislation regarding anti-seismic standards and where many modern constructions have, for reasons of economy, not respected those requirements anyway. Even by spending as little as €20,000-€30,000, an existing house can be rendered, if not 100 per cent earthquake proof, at least a lot safer.
The measures in question concern the use of reinforced concrete (only 10 per cent of the buildings that collapse are made in reinforced concrete), rather than just bricks and the "binding" of the house with a cordoloor ring of reinforced concrete that goes right around the house, below the roof and over every floor. Other measures include giant, hidden wall-to-wall "clamps", as well as X-shaped braces for internal walls. An important tip is to strengthen a wall where a window or door might have been blocked off. Obviously, foundations too could ideally be reinforced and rendered "elastic" but that is a much more complicated, expensive, not to say dangerous, operation with an old house.
Buildings where such measures are not introduced are death traps in the case of an earthquake. If there is no binding cordolo, the quake moves the building walls outwards, causing the whole construction to implode. The roof falls in on you.
STANDING ON Via XX Settembre on Monday evening, one rescue worker pointed out something that can be seen all over L’Aquila. Namely, two small apartment blocks side by side where one stands shaken but steady and where the other is flat as a pancake, with the dead buried somewhere in the rubble. Clearly, one builder has taken some form of basic anti-seismic precautions and the other has not.
In a country where building without proper planning permission is commonplace, the devastating impact of the L’Aquila earthquake comes as no surprise. Alessandro Martelli, who teaches construction in seismic areas at the University of Ferrara, puts it emphatically: “In Japan, an earthquake like that which hit L’Aquila wouldn’t even have made the papers.”
He and other experts argue that where a grade-seven earthquake would probably kill 50 in Japan, it might kill 5,000-11,000 in the Italian Apennines. Regional legislation for safe houses in seismic zones has long been in place in most of Italy, but the problem, as always, is enforcing the application of those building norms.
Clearly, Italy will long remain at risk of desperate tragedies such as that which struck L’Aquila this week. Only one comforting thought emerges from this tragedy, namely the nationwide expression of solidarity that became so intense that the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was obliged, on Wednesday, to ask people to stop sending food and clothes to Abruzzo. Italians know all about natural disasters and to many it seems only normal that you either go to help (an 8,500-strong volunteer rescue army has functioned all week) or you send food and clothing.
Italian Earthquakes
Year, epicentre, casualites
1693, Sicily Naples, 153,000
1783, Calabria, 50,000
1857,Naples, 11,000
1908, Sicily Calabria, 86,000
1915, Avezzano, 32,610
1930, Irpinia, 1,400
1980, Irpinia, 2,735
1997, Umbria Marche, 11
2002, Molise, 29
2009, L'Aquila, 290+