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Geologists Might Be Charged For Not Predicting Quake
mmmscience writes "In 2009, a series of small earthquakes shook the region of L'Aquila, Italy. Seismologists investigated the tremors, but concluded that there was no direct indication of a big quake on the horizon. Less than a month later, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake killed more than 300 people. Now, the chief prosecutor of L'Aquila is
looking to charge the scientists with gross negligent manslaughter for not predicting the quake."
I forget the specifics, but a local technically minded person had predicted this earthquake, largely based on gas venting. He gave a date and it didn't happen, so the local politicians went about prosecuting him for the equivalent of yelling "fire!". But then the earthquake hit the next day. I assume this is a continuing effort on the part of the local politicians and prosecutor to lay the blame anywhere but on themselves.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Nothing in the article really suggests that they were wrong given the evidence they had at the time. They're Geologists, not soothsayers.
Predictability is a continuum, not a binary scale. Earthquakes fall much further on the "hard to predict" side of things, but there is no arbitrary point at which you can draw a line. If a home inspector incorrectly claims a house has no sign of termites, a forester claims that a fire poses no danger to settled areas, or BP engineer claims that the methods used at Deepwater posed no danger to the environment, you aren't always going to be comfortable saying "oops, shit happens"
Were these geologists negligent? Given our current understanding of earthquakes, we can off-handedly state, "probably not", but we aren't sure. Is it unreasonable for somebody to want a court to investigate further, given the scale and scope of the damage? Not really.
Ok, maybe you need to know something about the Italian judiciary system. In Italy there is something called "obligatory penal action", which means that if there is even the simple suspect of a crime being committed, then an investigation must be started.
In the quake case, the investigation started because the people responsible for monitoring the situation explicitly reassured the population by telling them that there would be no big quake. Any responsible scientist, given the continuous small shakes that were ongoing, would have at least said something on the line "We believe there will be no major quake, but please do not lower your guard".
And that is why there was an investigation that ended with them being charged for negligence.
Winston P. Graves liked consistency in his life. He sat down at the table in his breakfast nook and carefully opened the paper with one hand while pouring cereal into a bowl with the other. He scanned the headlines and noted the "9.0 Earthquake Predicted Today: Mass Devastation!" and calmly looked toward his bowl while he poured the milk. He took comfort in the headline knowing there was no cause for concern. It was the same headline that had been there yesterday. And the day before. And every day before that since the big quake 18 years ago that actually did devastate the city and had killed more than 20,000 people. Following the quake, the attorney general, known for his flair in front of juries, won convictions, and death penalties, for the government geologists who had failed to predict the quake, and for the newspaper editors who had failed to act on the finally accurate prediction of the quake by a local astrologer. Since then, the new government geologists and newspaper editors following the example of that astrologer and published formal predictions of deadly earthquakes every day. Of course there had not been any notable earthquakes since then, but neither had there been executions.