http://www.thestar.com/news/world/ar...ughter-charges
Nearly 4,000 scientists from around the world are supporting six Italian geophysicists and a government official who go on trial Tuesday for manslaughter for not predicting a devastating 2009 earthquake.
The 6.3 magnitude quake killed 309 people in the central Italian city of L’Aquila and towns nearby, injured more than 1,500 and destroyed 20,000 buildings.
Although the verdict could take months or even years, the case has already sent a chill through the scientific community.
“Scientists have to shut up,” Enzo Boschi, then president of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, told Nature magazine.
“The academic legal community will be watching with great interest,” said defence lawyer Filippo Dinacci.
The National Commission for Forecasting and Predicting Great Risks, which met in earthquake-prone L’Aquila the week before the temblor, provided “incomplete, imprecise and contradictory information” according to the 224-page statement of charges filed in 2010 by public prosecutor Fabio Picuti.
“I know they can’t predict earthquakes,” Picuti told Nature. “As functionaries of the state, they had certain duties imposed by law: to evaluate and characterize the risks that were present in L’Aquila.”
Vincenzo Vittorini, who is a civil party in the lawsuit, contended, “This isn’t a trial against science,” he told Nature.
It’s an indictment, he said, of the “be calm, don’t worry” message sent out regularly to the town, despite minor tremors over several months and a 3.9 earthquake the day before.
Vittorini’s wife and daughter died in the earthquake April 6 and he spent six hours buried under rubble.
Journalist Giustino Parisse, who lost a teenage son and daughter, is also a party to the lawsuit.
“Science did not do what it was required to do,” he told the BBC. The national commission only intended on “pacifying” the population, he said.
According to the minutes of the now infamous March 31, Boschi was asked if the seismic rumblings could flatten the city as in 1703 and replied it was “unlikely, but the possibility cannot be totally excluded.”
Boschi had been surprised to see a dozen local officials there. He has since realized, he told Nature, that the point of the meeting was “to calm the population. We (the scientists) didn’t understand that until later on.”
Bernardo De Bernardinis, then vice-director of the Department of Civil Protection, told a news conference after the meeting the tremors were “certainly normal” and presented “no danger.”
In fact, he said, the tremors were a release of energy that could safeguard the region, something two scientists at the meeting said they disputed strongly.
Those two scientists, along with Boschi, de Bernardinis and others, face up to 15 years in jail if convicted of manslaughter. A separate civil lawsuit is asking for $30 million in damages.
“The charges against these scientists are both unfair and naïve. There is no accepted scientific method for earthquake prediction,” said Alan Leshner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.
He warned of a “chilling effect” on researchers if the Italian court finds the scientists guilty.
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Originally Posted by jbm
