Check the Earthquake Forecast

Last week I wrote about the decision by the Italian supreme court validating the claim of a plaintiff who said his cell phone caused him to develop a brain tumor. The science was, shall we say, sketchy.

But now another Italian court has rendered a decision that cannot be called anything but stunningly irrational.

On March 31, 2009, Italy's National Commission for Prediction and Prevention of Major Risks met to consider the significance of a series of minor tremors (an earthquake "swarm") in central Italy's Abruzzo region.  Enzo Boschi, president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, was asked if the swarm was a portent of a major quake in the immediate future.  Boschi said it was possible but unlikely.  The city of L'Aquila was struck by an earthquake six days later: magnitude 6.3, causing the collapse of tens of thousands of buildings, leaving more than 67,000 homeless and 308 dead.

The international consensus among geophysicists and seismologists is that the current state of scientific knowledge does not permit the prediction of earthquakes with any sort of precision or accuracy.  Thus we read about the likelihood that a particular region will likely suffer a major quake some time in the next century.  This is not exactly the sort of information on which you can base any short-term decisions, such as whether to evacuate a city, although you might choose not to live in a quake-prone region, just as many decide against living along parts of the Atlantic coast frequented by tropical storms and hurricanes.

I live in southwestern Pennsylvania, where we don't get much in the way of natural disasters.  Earthquakes and tornados are rare, and we get only remnants of hurricanes.  But I've been in a few car crashes on icy roads, which folks who live in hurricane and earthquake zones generally don't have to worry about.  So nothing is perfect.  We all make our choices.

But now seven members of the Commission have been convicted of manslaughter for failing to predict the major quake and issue a warning.  Their sentence - likely to be appealed - is six years in prison.

This truly defies reason.  In June 2010 an open letter was sent to the Italian president from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the internationally renowned and prestigious journal Science.  The letter, urging the dismissal of charges against the Italian commissioners, said:

Years of research, much of it conducted by distinguished seismologists in your own country, have demonstrated that there is no accepted scientific method for earthquake prediction that can be reliably used to warn citizens of an impending disaster. To expect more of science at this time is unreasonable. It is manifestly unfair for scientists to be criminally charged for failing to act on information that the international scientific community would consider inadequate as a basis for issuing a warning.

In a disturbing similarity to the kinds of things that happen in American civil courts, there was emotional testimony from witnesses who had lost loved ones in the quake - the sort of testimony that should have been considered irrelevant and highly prejudicial, and therefore excluded.

It is very difficult to imagine how competent jurisprudence could have failed to rely on the best scientific evidence and reach the conclusion that, tragic though the outcome surely was, no standard of criminal (or civil) negligence could possibly exist under which the Commission should be held responsible.

We have so much more to learn about earthquakes and other natural disasters. Perhaps some day scientists will be able to tell us when and where an earthquake will strike, much as we now get fairly accurate warnings about hurricanes, giving authorities days to order evacuations and spare many lives.

In Japanese mythology, the Namazu (鯰) is a giant catfish who lives in the mud under the island nation and causes earthquakes.  He is generally restrained by the god Kashima, but when Kashima becomes complacent and lets his guard down, the catfish thrashes about, and earthquakes result.

In modern science, Namazu has been replaced by plate tectonic theory.  But it seems the Italian legal authorities think their seismologists must be Kashima.