Is the death of 26 children after an earthquake this week the latest in a series of Italian tragedies that could and should have been avoided, asks Paddy Agnew in Rome
'In 27 years of service in every corner of Italy, I've never seen anything like it, not even in Irpinia, where there was a really frightening earthquake. It just doesn't seem real to me, those cement pillars almost doubled over on themselves," said fireman Francesco Salato in midweek, 24 hours before the village school in San Giuliano di Puglia, central Italy, collapsed in on itself on Thursday, taking with it the lives of 26 children and three adults.
Fireman Salato had in fact been speaking about the damage he witnessed earlier this week in the little village of Santa Venerina at the foot of the volcanic Mount Etna in Sicily, where tremors in the wake of the volcano's eruption had wreaked huge devastation on buildings, many of which had been built within the last 15 years or less. The things that did not "seem real" to the fireman at the foot of Mount Etna would likely have seemed equally unreal to him at San Giuliano di Puglia. Namely, the widespread reality of less than rigorous earthquake-proof building practices in a country noted for its intense seismic activity (see panel).
In the immediate aftermath of Thursday's tragedy at San Giuliano di Puglia, Enzo Boschi, president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, spelt it out loud and clear: "Many regions, starting with the Abruzzo and heading south along the Apennine ridge to eastern Sicily, are seriously at risk from seismic activity. People should remind regional presidents, mayors and local government officials of their responsibilities. They must put an end to this havoc. The legislation is there requiring that you don't build in seismic areas without complying with required saftey standards".
For Boschi, Thursday's tragedy was both all too obviously predictable and, equally worryingly, all too possibly repeatable. He argues that in a country which registers more than 8,000 earthquakes per year (most of them so light they pass unnoticed), central and local government have been consistently negligent in their inability or unwillingness to enforce rigorous building procedures that include anti-seismic techniques.
It escaped no one's attention this week that the schoolhouse in San Guiliano di Puglia was almost the only building in the little village to collapse under the impact of the earthquake. All around the 1954-built schoolhouse, medieval-era buildings stood strong and solid, many without as much as a brick or stone missing.
Geophysicists argue that the reason for this is that older buildings are often simply much more "elastic" than modern ones in which reinforced concrete (especially reinforced concrete roofs, as in the schoolhouse) can prove fatal. Unlike the mortar and stone of older buildings, which "go with the earthquake flow", reinforced concrete tends to snap and collapse under the dual horizontal and vertical pressure brought on by a tremor such as that at San Giuliano di Puglia (5.4 on the Richter scale).
Not for nothing, one of the cardinal principles of anti-seismic construction is to build deep, laterally extending foundations which can ride both the horizontal and vertical thrust of a serious tremor. Unfortunately, however, just 40 per cent of buildings in those Italian regions most noted for their seismic activity have been built in accordance with such anti-seismic principles.
Two factors explain this apparently illogical, almost suicidal reality - local government negligence and building costs. Prof Vincenzo Petrini, head of engineering at Milan's Politecnico University, estimates that anti-seismic systems add up to 10 per cent to the overall cost of building a new house, while modifying an existing building in accordance with anti-seismic practices can cost as much as 40 per cent of the building's total value. (This latter high cost is inevitably engendered by, among other things, the need to carry out radical modification of the foundations).
"The safety of a building cannot be established merely by its age," says Petrini. "There are old buildings which have been well-designed and built just as there are new buildings that have been poorly conceived. Unfortunately, though, the reality is that 60 per cent of the buildings in those regions of Italy most subject to earthquakes simply do not offer guarantees."
If the additional cost at least partly explains the lack of anti-seismic building, above all in the private sector, then what about the responsibilities of local government? Here, Boschi points an accusatory finger: "After the Irpinia earthquake [2,914 dead in 1980], all the political forces of the day swore that they would act so that such a tragedy could not ever happen again. Yet, in the end, nothing was done. Since then, we have on average spent €4.5 million per annum on funding post-earthquake reconstruction. Yet, if we had spent just half a million euro a year, we could have made all those buildings safe.
"That is the real problem. We have behaved like an ignorant country that refuses to address priorities and resolve problems. If we don't get to a point where preventive action, building maintenance and regular monitoring become serious, the sort of things that happened in Molise this week, or perhaps even worse, will continue to happen. You have got to remember that these tragedies have been caused by that which man has constructed."
You might argue that Boschi is speaking from a bascially defensive position since his institute has been at the focus of attacks this week for having failed to predict Thursday's tragedy. A series of minor tremors in the Molise area had been registered on Wednesday night, leading some of the distraught people of San Giuliano di Puglia to claim that the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology should have alerted them to the forthcoming danger.
Seismologists, however, tend to agree with Boschi's claim that it was impossible to predict Thursday's quake. Officials at the institute point out that Italy's most seismically active regions (Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Marche, Molise and eastern Sicily) register up to 60 such minor tremors per 24 hours. As Boschi put it on Thursday: "If we advised people to abandon their homes every time we register a minor tremor in Italy, then the country would soon be deserted. The institute simply cannot predict earthquakes like this."
Local government accountability rather than early-alarm systems for earthquakes remains a much more central issue to Italy's series of natural disaster tragedies. Lax house regulations or the failure to implement existing regulations have already played a major part in the flooding and landslide tragedies that have hit Campania, Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria in recent years.
The Italian passion for il mattone (literally, the brick) means that too many local government blind eyes are turned (often in return for a kickback) towards too many ill-conceived buildings on inappropriate sites. Put simply, the national territory can absorb only so much cement. Worse, if the cement is put down on seismic territory without proper precautions, then trouble lies ahead.
Boschi does not predict a rosy future. Asked if he could see a possible improvement in the picture concerning earthquakes and safety in Italy, he answered: "Not if nobody does anything. If we go on like this, it's like building houses without roofs and then hoping that it won't rain."