Tags
Abruzzo earthquake, Brisband floods, Christchurch, Fukushima, insurance companies, L'Aquila, natural disasters, Victorian bushfires
The ABC today ran an interesting and somewhat alarming story about six seismologists being jailed in Italy for failing to provide adequate warning of a magnitude 6.8 quake that devastated the ancient town of L’Aquila in April 2009 – killing 300 people and injuring 1,000 more.
The furore over the sentencing and imprisonment was described from the point of view of the scientific community being up in arms and making ugly noises about the imprisonment being a major disincentive for any scientist – or I suppose other professionals like engineers to provide advice to government in case the advice results in a pear-shaped disaster.
It raises several issues –
- the culpability of professionals for their advice – regardless of whether they could have accurately foreseen the consequences or not;
- societies’ desire for laying the blame and making somebody pay for the bad things that can and do happen to individuals, and
- insurance companies’ comparative appetites for risk and profit.
We have seen comparable post-disaster witch hunting in Australia in the terrible Victorian bushfires and the Queensland / Brisbane floods where government officials have been shown the blowtorch on the belly for making – or conversely not making decisions that might have had less severe outcomes. Professional careers have been ruined as well as lives lost and there is not much coverage of the psychological damage wrought on professionals who may suffer terrible guilt mingled with entrenched denial of culpability for the caprices of nature.
The scientists at the heart of the L’Aquila earthquake matter were essentially criticised for having met a few days before the major quake when small tremors had been experienced – and having issued cautious warnings – that presumably the locals ignored. Neither of these mishaps is difficult to understand. The ABC piece speaks of Italy as having the most seismically active regions in Europe with hundreds of tremors each year. And the assertion is that few of these small tremors precede major quakes.
It’s easy to imagine that a scientist who frequently calls “wolf” just in case – causing massive scale evacuations to no good effect is pretty soon going to be facing the same gun as those recently incarcerated.
But in truth, when dealing with mother nature, nobody, not even the best scientists with the most experience and state of the art equipment, data and computing power can really tell the future. So it should not be open for anyone to not just apportion blame, but to mete out punishment to a scientist for being, at the end of the day, merely human and having interpreted equivocal information in a way that time judged to be incorrect.
While the police and judiciary in L’Aquila and say, New Orleans have sought to bang heads in the name of retribution for the dead and suffering populations in their boroughs, there seems to be little appetite amongst the Japanese for payback to the executives, engineers and scientists who clearly were responsible for the design, operation and maintenance of the Fukushima – and other nuclear reactors – disasters in waiting for which they were able to plan and have contingencies in place. Curious.
While public officials and politicians may be content to sheet home the blame for the extent of damage caused by natural disasters in the man made environment, insurance companies – for whom the threat of the same is pure oxygen – blame is directly linked to profit. These monsters will happily take the cash from punters for decades, and when the shit hits the fan, they are genetically predisposed to try to apportion as much blame to the victims – or other insurance companies’ customers as possible – All in the name of profit. Nothing to do with ameliorating the disaster.
Witness the hair-splitting of disgraceful insurers over the definition of floodwater versus storm water in their slimy attempts to defraud policy holders of their due entitlement to compensation.
Pity the poor people of New Orleans who have lived through one of America’s worst natural disasters. Whole devastated districts remain, years after the events because even those who were insured – and who received some kind of payout for having their homes and possessions destroyed cannot rebuild because the insurance companies have refused to re-insure any property in these particularly low-lying neighbourhoods. The boroughs where live the poorest Americans.
One of the major differences between the New Orleans and L’Aquila disasters was the response of the disaster management authorities after the events. The incompetence of the Bush-appointed managers and the President himself in taking a leadership role was perhaps the lowest point in an epically bad presidency. But the strengths of the Churches and welfare agencies and the massive resources in the US economy to assist the people of Louisiana proved to be decisive in the end. Not much has been said about the fate of the people of L’Aquila after the quake. The ABC piece said that this is the third time that the ancient town has been flattened and one wonders, like it is for the good folk of Christchurch, whether enough is now enough.
It is some comfort – perhaps small comfort to see the victims of these terrible disasters coming together to support each other, but there is a similar look on both the faces of the insured and the uninsured alike. The look is a mix of apprehension about the steep mountain they will both need to climb and the appreciation of the care and support they afford each other.
So is there any justification for punishing scientists and engineers who time later proves to have “got it wrong” ? Will it raise the dead or the buildings ?
Very dangerous precedent indeed. Remember the Challenger disaster? The scientists were ‘overly cautious’ so they went ahead with the mission despite warnings, and…boom. Remember Katrina? Engineers warned for years that the levies were insufficient and sitting ducks for a decently powerful storm…oops. So negligence in those situations was excusable, but not adequately shouting from the mountaintops about an impending earthquake – an earthquake which was just as likely to hit in a century as this past year – is punishable by prison sentences.
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My nephew now reports in the last couple of days from where he is (Korea I think) swinging around inside the 18th floor of a high rise and getting squeamish. One of his Facebook friends reports the 27th floor where he /she lives was pretty heady. I posted Tom Waits ‘The piano has been drinking’ after making comment I supposed it didn’t cut it to suggest the building had been drinking, which did arouse a laugh. After all, that’s my beloved sister’s son and his wife and child I felt alerted by regards earthquakes to send an image that might help him get through another rumble like that (it was big).
I do appreciate Big M’s heartfelt report of what he thinks about the seismologists’ being jailed.
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A great song, ‘The Piano Has Been Drinking”… Here it is:
I think about a dozen countries, worldwide are now playing with HAARPs… Wonder if the HAARP has been drinking…
😐
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I think I used to have a guitar by the same instrument-maker…
😉
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asty, here is the version I sent to my nephew. I think the expression for someone in this condition in this one is totally out of control…within artistic limits of course 🙂
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The seven were found guilty of multiple manslaughter, after having been accused of giving “falsely reassuring messages” to the population prior to the quake in April. Witnesses in the trial claimed that their relatives chose not to leave their houses before the quake struck because they were reassured by the committee that a bigger quake was unlikely, although not impossible.
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I was shocked to read that the seismologists had been charged, then thought the story about them being gaoled was a joke. There was a similar carry on after the Newcastle earthquake. Why didn’t scientists predict this? (there had never been an earthquake here in white man’s history) But those greedy/stupid/slack builders/engineers/architects didn’t design the buildings properly! (they had, according to non-earthquake standards) Why weren’t the building codes up to scratch? (they were, for pre-earthquake Newcastle)
The point is that, most of the time people do the right thing, with the best intention, and the best interest of their clients/patients/customers/recipients at heart. No one maliciously hopes for mayhem and disaster, unless they have a psychiatric condition. Even then, they are hardly culpable for the misfortunes described in Emmjay’s most excellent essay!
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Thank you, Big. Kind words as always (and soft hands for the patients, I’m betting)
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You see, M, an event like this earthquake, natural and unavoidable as it was, creates a helluva lot of emotional turmoil; and chief among the ‘drivers’ of all that emotion is frustration, which leads inevitably to anger; and anger is a dangerous emotion to have too much of it just floating round directionlessly, especially during what inevitably becomes a national disaster; so the people must be given something to focus their anger on before they start doing things like blaming the authorities for not imposing earthquake-proof building codes and for not providing adequate emergency services in the face of known natural threats.
So they need to find a scapegoat… and it doesn’t really matter who is used for this purpose; anyone who is vulnerable and who can somehow be tied in to the causation of the disaser is likely to find themselves in this unenviable position.
Those poor seizemologists will now be treated as if somehow they actually caused the earthquake! One might be forgiven, in the 21st century, for imagining the world had outgrown such superstitious barbarisms, but apparently not; in our own way, our ‘modern’ societies all still practise ALL the ancient blood-rituals (human sacrifice/scapegoat rituals/cannibalism/messenger-killing/whipping-boys/hero-cults… etc), superstitious and ineffective as they are, rather than look for real solutions to solveable problems…
Solveable? Well, it’s true one can’t prevent earthquakes; even if it is now possible to cause them (a fact which may be of significance when paired with the apparent absence of ‘natural’ seizmological warning in the case of this earthquake… does this not in itself suggest the possibility of a non-natural cause for it? HAARP?) BUT it IS possible to be adequately prepared for them in order to at least minimize damage and casualty-levels.
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Those who were involved with the Wivenhoe Dam flood management are actually forbidden by court order from commenting on how the waters were released. It’s about protecting the government from litigation. Given that they were dealing with unprecedented inflows with nearly a metre of rain falling in parts of the catchment in a relatively short time. What actually happened was a double peak. Had the dam not been there there would have been a flood peak about 5 metres above the 1974 flood. The dam did what it was designed to do.
Large parts of Ipswich and most of the Gold Coast, particularly the canal developments which were allowed to be developed by Joh have housing below the 1:100 year flood, so the comments by some goose councillor is to deflect responsibility from the council. The Brisbane flood was an event greater than 1:100 and more like 1:500 year, just like the floods in the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee valleys were probably the biggest floods since white settlement.
Who’d make a decision or an opinion nowadays when some prick pollie or donkey brained journo or councillor is looking sue you or insurance company runs away from its responsibilities.
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So nice to see Elvis WITH his legs… if only briefly…
😉
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What HAS the bass singer got down his trousers ? I can see, I think why he’s singing bass. Otherwise, the song seems to be a real estate complaint.
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Indeed… seemed to me like an early version of ‘We Gotta Get Outa This Place’… Put to footage from the ’30s movie based on Steinbeck’s novel, ‘Grapes of Wrath’… all it needed was Woodie Guthrie… maybe he was the bassist… didn’t get a good look at him… Coulda been a Woodie Guthrie song too… I’m sure Woodie wrote many such real estate complaint songs; maybe Algernon could dig out a couple? (Though I might have a dig myself later on, if I should happen to find myself in that region of YouTube!)
🙂
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Fixin’ a Hole (where the rain gets in)…the Beatles (Paul McCartney I think). 🙂
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…a real estate complaint or St Vitus …
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Nah, that wasn’t St Vitus’ dance, ‘Shoe… it was the effect of termites in Elvis’s wooden legs…
You see, the reason you never saw Elvis from the waist down after a few very early pics is because he had them both amputated at the pelvis as the result of a severe case of rickets; the early prosthetic technology used to replace them, as shown in this movie, however, was wooden, and termites played havoc with their locomotion (which fact, incidentally is what inspired Little Eva’s song of the same name!)
Of course, in later movies where they actually do show them, he has real high-tech legs… nothin’ but the best for da King! But he’s still a little unsteady on ’em.
😉
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Isn’t it why they got mad in Italy and jailed these scientists? Real estate depreciation?
Mumble…mumble…legless…mumble
🙂
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Perhaps this is a good point to post a link to one of the phenomena I intend to discuss in my upcoming ‘conspiracy theoris’ article… (if I can bring myself to write it!)
Anyway, here’s a link to a new and classified series of experiments being carried out by the good ol’ US of A, known as High-Frequency Active Auraral Research Project, or HAARP, for short:
What has this to do with earthquakes, I hear you ask… watch the movie…
😉
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A whole hour ! Cripes….. I hate to HAARP on about it 🙂
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True it is rather a long video, but no-one is obliged to watch it all…
On the other hand, however, I personally found it well worth watching every second… whaddaya think caused the Japanese tsunami?
😉
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I play a HAARP.
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Ye god and little fishes, ‘Shoe! I most certainly hope you don’t! (I’ve never even liked ‘Harp’ lager!)
Unless, of course, it’s a ‘blues-harp’!
😉
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Another scapegoat ritual? Why am I not surprised?
😐
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If designs are at fault then the engineers or architects are culpable but with natural disasters, even the best of designs can give up, so… I feel that it is a matter of severity of the natural disaster and the strength of the design that would have to be considered. I think it a bit over the top with punishing the designers or scientists when it comes to earth quakes or tsunamis. Holland is below sea level for a large part. One could claim it was always silly to live below sea level. Should we now put a possible future claim of ‘fault’ at the poor monks that were the original dijk builders some hundreds of years ago?
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