Italian Justice not so Predictable

[woodchip]

So you thought you'd use that new Geology degree where you specialized in plate tectonics, earthquakes and trying to forecast when they will happen. You're in luck as there are 6 new positions in Italy that need to be filled:

"Rarely since a Catholic inquisition in Rome condemned Galileo Galilei to spend the remainder of his days under house arrest for the heresy of teaching that the Earth revolves around the sun, has an Italian court been so wrong about science.
Today, a court in the central Italian city of L'Aquila, 380 years after that miscarriage of justice, sentenced six scientists and a government bureaucrat to six years in jail on manslaughter charges for their failure to predict a 2009 earthquake that left more than 300 people dead."

And no, I do not blame Obama for this

[CDN_Merlin]

It's a shame but let me tell you a story about misjustice.

My mother in law was sitting in her backyard 2 years ago with my step-daughter in the house. She was out having a cigarette before they went out for a bday lunch. Without knowing, a woman drove off the road, hit her above ground well (moved it 2 inches, it's concrete) and landed on top of her. She had the hot fluids pour over the back of her neck and burn her, she's broken all over and can barely wipe her ass.

2+ years later she's still fighting to get compensation from the insurance company. Yesterday was the womans criminal trial. She was high on dope, in possession of narcotics, driving a car with no brakes and the ebrake was not working. Guess what, SHE GOT OFF with no charges.

Why? Because the charges of dangerous driving were found not guilty because she said she swerved to miss another car. The charge of driving a car unfit for the road, well she lied and said her brakes failed at that moment. Nevermind the mechanic who inspected the car said the brakes were gone long before that day and also the original mechanic who put the "safety" sticker on the car has already been convicted and sentenced.

This is our wonderful justice system in Canada.

[flip]

Both sound like flagrant cases of perverting justice to me.

[CDN_Merlin]

It's bullcrap if you ask me. My mom-in-law is mentally and physically scarred from this and she gets away with it? WTF!!!!! Sorry but you can't see my frustration with our justice system. It's unfair that the innocent victims always have to suffer more and more even after the crime was committed.

[flip]

I'm more apt to forgive human frailty than I am insurance companie's for not following through on their obligations.

[CDN_Merlin]

Oh you don't want to hear the BS the insurance company is doing to my mom-in-law. The odacity they have to ask her to go to different countries to get tested etc is retarded. It's been 26 months since the accident and she has not had any settlement. The sad part is the lawyers will get 35% if they go to court, 33% if they settle our of court. That's insane.

[woodchip]

And there I thought this would be a discussion of predictive science and the Italian judicial system. Silly me.

[CDN_Merlin]

Sorry Woodchip,

I do think the Italian gov't has gone way overboard with this. I don't think anyone can predict an earthquake with pin point accuracy. It's another one of those "stupid laws' that have existed since the dawn of time and some dumb ass lawyer decided to bring it up.

[Foil]

I'd be interested in seeing some documentation on this, because I've found that outraged articles written about court judgements typically misrepresent what the judge/jury/court actually decided. (In other words, I'm guessing it's not quite as simple as, "They were found guilty because they didn't have a magic crystal ball. Dumb Italians".)

For example:
Were there some warning signs that the scientists/bureaucrat wilfully ignored, or did not report?
Did they negligently declare a dangerous building earthquake-safe?
Were there some safety legislation that could have saved lives, and they dismissed or ignored it?

Maybe it was a gross injustice. But I'd like to see more detail.

[fliptw]

They were on trial for saying they can't predict earthquakes in a manner that caused some people to stay for the earthquake.

a nice summary

[callmeslick]

And no, I do not blame Obama for this

.....give it time.

[Foil]

They were on trial for saying they can't predict earthquakes in a manner that caused some people to stay for the earthquake.

a nice summary

Ah, thank you. Exactly what I was looking for!

For those who don't want to click the link:

Despite the way the verdict has been portrayed in the media as an attack on science, it is important to note that the seven were not on trial for failing to predict the earthquake. As members of an official risk commission, they had all participated in a meeting held in L’Aquila on 31 March 2009, during which they were asked to assess the risk of a major earthquake in view of the many tremors that had hit the city in the previous months, and responded by saying that the earthquake risk was clearly raised but that it was not possible to offer a detailed prediction. The meeting was unusually quick, and was followed by a press conference at which the Civil Protection Department and local authorities reassured the population, stating that minor shocks did not increase the risk of a major one.

According to the prosecutor, such reassurances led 29 victims who would otherwise have left L’Aquila in the following days to change their minds and decide to stay; they died when their homes collapsed. The prosecutor thus reasoned that the “inadequate” risk assessment of the expert panel led to scientifically incorrect messages being given to the public, which contributed to a higher death count.

Being convicted for the way their risk assessment was used (e.g. miscommunicated to the public)? Okay, I'll agree this is a gross injustice.

[Tunnelcat]

Earthquake prediction is still not exact. The earth is a chaotic system that cannot be predicted with any degree of accuracy, especially down to the day, week or month. Sure, there are telltales like sudden increases in seismic activity, or even the sudden lack thereof, increases in certain gases and isotopes, ground swelling, etc., but it's still mostly a guessing game with indeterminate clues. To blame a bunch of scientists because they could not give an exact date and time for a risk assessment is ludicrous. Me thinks the Italians are looking for scape-coats to cover up their own desires to keep letting people live or work in old stone Roman and Renaissance era buildings that have no seismic protection at all. They cherish their history, until it falls down on them.

A good example of people ignoring an earthquake hazard was Mt. St. Helens in 1980. All the sudden increases in seismic activity and ground movement raised alarm bells and scientists actually did put out warnings that an eruption was imminent. One big quake finally triggered the eruption. Did people ignore those warnings and stick around, yes. Did many die because of it, yes. Why? Because the predictions couldn't pin down the event to within days of it happening. After a few weeks of warnings, people started feeling complacent and began to ignore them. They were even curious, to their detriment.

I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for a couple of years. As it happened, I was there right before the Loma Prieta Quake. All was quiet up until about a year before the main quake, but then we started getting a series of quakes ranging from 3 to 5.6. Was that a warning? Possibly. I knew something bigger was going to happen, but it didn't dissuade me from living there because I knew our home was well earthquake proofed, which, by the way, held up well with very minor damage.

If you want to live in an earthquake prone zone, put in good building regulations like they do in California and even Oregon. When I built my house, I had to have earthquake strapping put in many areas. The floor joists to wall connections, the foundation sill-plates to the wall around the garage door openings and especially strapping from the chimney to the roof structure. Even the water heater is strapped to the wall. But I still think even those precautions may not save my home in the severity of earthquake they predict here. If the PNW gets one, it will be a mega quake, around 9 or 10. The heavy concrete tile roof on my home will rack the structure so severely during a big quake, it will surely come down, probably on me. Do I move? Nah. Do I re-roof my home? Can't afford it right now. So I roll the dice and pray, but I don't blame the scientists that can't predict or give an exact risk assessment of the next big one down to the day or hour.

[Spidey]

IIRC less than 100 people died in the Mt. St. Helens eruption, some of them being the scientists watching.

A remarkably low number.

As I remember, the only people who stayed, where the ones that would have stayed in any event.

[Tunnelcat]

You're forgetting old Harry at Spirit Lake. He didn't think the mountain would kill him.

There were 25 confirmed dead and 32 are still missing and have never been found. Of those, quite a few of them were sightseers and loggers up there that morning.

http://www.olywa.net/radu/valerie/mshvictims.html

[woodchip]

I was taught that it is better to have a number of small quakes preceding a larger one, as the smaller quakes release tension on the plate boundaries thus reducing the effects of the pending larger quake.

[Tunnelcat]

I was taught that it is better to have a number of small quakes preceding a larger one, as the smaller quakes release tension on the plate boundaries thus reducing the effects of the pending larger quake.

Not this time with the Loma Prieta quake. Both the San Andreas and the Calaveras faults were letting go with little swarms of smaller quakes for about a year before the main quake happened. I don't know why that was the case, but so many of them in the 3.0 to 5.0 range were happening, it became a rut. I even woke up during a 4.0 one night, waited for it to get done and then I fell back to sleep. I sat in the kitchen another time and watched as the building across the alley swayed back and forth out of sync with our building.

[Top Gun]

I was taught that it is better to have a number of small quakes preceding a larger one, as the smaller quakes release tension on the plate boundaries thus reducing the effects of the pending larger quake.

It really depends on the situation, and there's still a ton we need to learn about the exact sequence of events that precedes an earthquake. There are situations where a bunch of minor quakes wind up amounting to nothing in the end. There are others where a single, massive quake occurs without any sort of minor quakes beforehand. And then there are those like L'Aquila, where a bunch of minor quakes occurred, yet the larger quake following them was still massively destructive. Attempts to predict what sorts of situations will produce what sorts of quakes are still in their infancy; as you'd imagine, it's very difficult to directly study collisions between continental plates that may occur a few dozen miles under the Earth's surface. It'll be awesome if we're eventually able to figure out some general patterns on exactly where and when earthquakes are likely to occur.

Regarding the original topic, I can't really express how angry this ruling makes me. Not only is it horrible for the individual scientists involve, and I hope to God that sanity prevails on appeal, but it's a dangerous precedent for scientific work as a whole. If there's a suggestion that scientists should only make statements with 100% certainty or risk being sued/charged, they'll be afraid to say anything, and we'll all lose out greatly.

[woodchip]

I think at the time we were studying the San Andreas fault and how pressures of the American continental plate interacts with the Pacific plate. Slippage between the plates being the cause of the quakes and the longer pressure builds up, the greater the force of the earthquake. So it was preferable to have a number of smaller slippages over time so pressure did not build up for a superquake. Other areas of course will have their own unique characteristics depending on how and in what direction their plate boundaries are moving.

[Tunnelcat]

Slip fault quakes, like what typically occurs on the San Andreas, can have smaller precursor quakes before a large one. Sometimes the stresses get too much and the fault starts to slip in small increments in one section before the bigger quake hits. That doesn't mean that in another area, things are still locked up and storing energy. It's when that locked section lets go that the big quake will happen.

In a subduction zone, where one crustal plate is being pushed under another plate, that's where the monster quakes can happen because the faults in that zone usually lock up for a very long time and any movement, or lack thereof, is hard to detect beforehand. When things finally release, there is a lot of rebound and ground movement. Japan's latest quake that generated that huge tsunami was a subduction zone quake. The sea floor literally bounced back up when the fault let go, displacing a huge amount of water.

Think the people of Japan would like to be able to predict those quakes before they happen? The Italians should quit placing blame people when the earth is a natural chaotic system and very unpredictable, no matter how hard we try to see predictors and patterns. The ONLY blame that should be put on people are towards those who built the buildings that fell down during the quake. But I guess they're long since dead.

[Top Gun]

The problem with Italy, and indeed other parts of Europe, is that you have a lot of people living in masonry buildings that might go back a few hundred years, and masonry is an absolutely terrible building material for an earthquake-prone area. It can very easily get shaken to pieces, as opposed to a modern steel structure that can be designed to have a degree of flexibility, or even a wood-frame building that inherently has some give to it. Of course saying that people in that area shouldn't be living in all of these older structures probably isn't a very popular suggestion.

[Kilarin]

According to one report I read, the problem was that the city was afraid that the earthquake fears were hurting the tourist business, so they went to the scientist and said, "convince the people to shut up about this earthquake stuff!"

I've got a BIT more sympathy for the judgment if that is what happened. But only a smidgen. The end result here will be that scientists will be afraid to make any kind of prediction. Science is predicated upon different points of view being expressed. If they must be terrified that they will be put in jail if their analysis is wrong, they will probably just not publish.

[woodchip]

And so it begins Kilarin:

ROME – Four top Italian disaster experts quit their posts Tuesday, saying the manslaughter convictions of former colleagues for failing to adequately warn of a deadly 2009 earthquake means they can't effectively perform their duties

[Kilarin]

And so it begins Kilarin:

ROME – Four top Italian disaster experts quit their posts Tuesday, saying the manslaughter convictions of former colleagues for failing to adequately warn of a deadly 2009 earthquake means they can't effectively perform their duties

Can't blame em.

[Top Gun]

Yeah, I'd get the hell out of that job too if my country's legal system was that insane.