10/26/12 Toronto Star: L’AQUILA EARTHQUAKE CONVICTIONS ABOUT POOR COMMUNICATION

L’AQUILA EARTHQUAKE CONVICTIONS ABOUT POOR COMMUNICATION

Published on Friday October 26, 2012

Toronto Star

Mary Albino

Special to the Star

Even if the convictions of the seven Italian experts charged with manslaughter for their roles in the April 6, 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy are eventually overturned, there is no doubt this is a watershed case.

The six seismologists and one government official have been sentenced to six years in prison each and must also pay court costs and damages of $10.2 million for telling the public they had nothing to worry about in the days before a major earthquake killed 309 people and devastated the city.

For months, L’Aquila, which sits on a major fault line, had been experiencing regular tremors. Residents worried they were indications of a pending earthquake. Their concerns were intensified by the quack forecasts of Gioacchino Giuliani, a local physics lab technician, who claimed elevated radon levels warned of a coming earthquake.

The Italian government convened the National Commission for the Forecast of Prevention of Major Risks on March 30, 2009 with the mission of providing an authoritative statement on the risks of a possible earthquake in L’Aquila. All of the convicted were present at this meeting.

After less than an hour, a press conference was held at which the head of the committee, Bernardo de Bernardis, a senior official in the Civil Protection Authority, told people not to worry. “The scientific community tells me there is no danger,” he said, “because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favourable.”

When a reporter asked if the public should sit back and enjoy a glass of wine rather than worry, De Bernardis replied, “Absolutely, absolutely a Montepulciano . . . ”

But in wiretap transcripts made public halfway through the trial, it became clear that the meeting had been part of a “media operation” to calm the population and was never intended to be a real scientific evaluation. We want “to calm down the public,” De Bernardis said the day before the meeting. “And instead of you and me . . . we’ll have the top scientists in the field of seismology talking.”

In fact, the scientific reasons given for claiming there would be no earthquake were not accurate. According to Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center and author of the report on the L’Aquila disaster commissioned by the Italian government, the discharge of energy is an indication of increased risk of an earthquake.

But getting this wrong is not what the experts were charged with. The prosecution made crystal clear from the beginning that the accusation was of giving “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information.” The public was not made aware of the scientific nuances of the conversation among the seismologists but instead got the oversimplified and misleading summary of a non-seismologist.

The real issues here pertain to the nature of risk communication and the obligations of experts.

Risks by definition are uncertain. This means that communication about them will include words such as “possibility,” “potential” and “some chance” — all of which rub up against the desire of public officials to appear authoritative. The desire for certainty and clarity also comes from the audience, who prefer a clear directive to a murky one from which they will have to make their own judgment.

“The universal human preference for certainty in risk communications leads us to put considerable pressure on risk communicators to tell us they’re certain, even if they’re not,” says Dr. Peter Sandman, a world expert on risk communication,

The message de Bernardis presented at the press conference was far more reassuring than it should have been based on what he and the commission knew and didn’t know. The scientists, two of whom sat through the press conference and said nothing and four of whom went home, colluded, therefore, in the delivery of a falsely reassuring message.

In an email to Italian reporter Anna Meldolesi the day after the verdict, Sandman suggested that the ideal message would have been something like this:

“There isn’t any scientific basis for concluding that a major earthquake is much likelier in the wake of all these tremors than at other times. But neither is there strong science proving that an earthquake won’t happen soon. Sooner or later there will probably be another major earthquake here, but we simply cannot predict when — or when not.

“We’re sorry to offer people so little guidance, but the truth is we don’t know whether the swarm of tremors is grounds for concern or not. Usually, swarms are not followed by large quakes. But ‘usually’ isn’t ‘always.’ We certainly understand why many in this community feel safer leaving their homes when the tremors start, and we have no science that says they’re foolish to do so.”

This statement would not have fulfilled the public relations requirements of the meeting. It would not have relieved L’Aquila’s anxiety.

The case also raises the issue of the relationship between expert and lay knowledge in policy-making.

Earthquakes have been happening in L’Aquila for hundreds of years. The worst was in 1703, when 3,000 people died. Folk wisdom says that when low-level tremors occur, it is best to sleep outside because buildings might collapse.

Brian Wynne, an expert on public risk perceptions at the University Lancaster in the U.K., contends the problem is when the experts leave no room for other kinds of knowledge. “We’ve become ultra-reliant on science,” he told the Star, and this, in turn, makes us “overreactive to its failure.”

The citizens of L’Aquila were willing to abandon hundreds of years of learned knowledge in favour of the expertise of the scientists.

Vincenzo Vittorini, whose wife and daughter were killed in the earthquake, told Nature magazine in the weeks after, “That night, all the old people in L’Aquila, after the first shock, went outside and stayed outside for the rest of the night . . . Those of us who are used to using the Internet, television, science — we stayed inside.”

Despite the difficulties of this case, it is a rare example of accountability in the context of disaster.

“People who handled hurricane Katrina kept their jobs, retired honourably and still have their pensions,” says Ben Smilowitz, executive director of the international Disaster Accountability Project, based in Washington, D.C. “And 2,000 people died.

“If these guys didn’t provide the public with the right information, and 309 people died as a result, then they should be held accountable for that.”

His concern is that zoning-law officials, construction workers, landlords and all the other negligent players are duly charged. “It’s hard for me to believe that only risk communications was at fault.”

Between the years 2000 and 2011, 2.7 billion people worldwide were affected by disaster. While all those tsunamis, floods, hurricanes or landslides were natural, the scope of the destruction they caused was not.

The upswing of the controversial L’Aquila case is the attention it’s brought to the role of human decision-making in events people tend to think of as accidents of nature.