The L’Aquila earthquake blame game: Punishing the vulnerable, pardoning the state
By Giuseppe Forino, Sara Bonati, Monia del Pinto, Isabella Tomassi and Lucia Velotti
Italy is one of the most seismic prone countries in the world. Thus, it is not rare for seismic swarms to occur, like the ones that took place from December 2008 and that led to the L’Aquila earthquake on 6th April 2009. At 3.32 am, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake shook the city of L’Aquila in Central Italy, and its surrounding areas. A total of 309 people died, and thousands of buildings and infrastructures were heavily damaged.
In the aftermath of the earthquake, people struggling to get out the rubbles and looking for help were in disbelief: just a few hours before the earthquake, they had been reassured by the Italian Department of Civil Protection (IDCP) that the ongoing seismic swarm was not a precursor to an earthquake, but an indicator of energy release, and therefore it was a good sign because it would have most likely prevented an earthquake. This was obviously an inaccurate statement, since until now scientists are not able to predict, where, how, and with which magnitude an earthquake will occur. To add fuel to the fire, the media notified the general public that at 3.32 am (at the time of the earthquake) some building company owners and contractors stated in a wire-tapping that they were laughing, thinking of the possible profits that could be generated by the reconstruction process.
Yet, the L’Aquila earthquake also had global and controversial resonance for the trial and prosecution of seven IDCP functionaries (Alexander, 2014) for having reassured the people in the at-risk area about the impending earthquake (Imperiale and Vanclay, 2019). The reassurance came after the seven members of the seismic committee were pressured to make such a statement to put an end to a state of deep uncertainty. Thus, regardless of all the mitigation and preparedness suggestions for low probability/ high consequences events, the population was prepared for the best instead of the worst case scenario. In consideration of this, the IDCP functionaries were found guilty of multiple manslaughter, bodily harm, and conspiracy. The reassurance provided to the population was deemed as approximate, generic, ineffective, inaccurate, and contradictory information on the nature, causes, and future developments of the seismic swarms (Lauta, 2014; Imperiale and Vanclay, 2019). In turn, because of the reassurance people changed their protective behaviour (Ciccozzi, 2013). A change in people’s behaviour is a direct consequence of people stopping to rely on their acquired “disaster subculture” (Engel et al., 2014) in favour of a reliance on trusted governmental institutions. Thus, the IDCP functionaries were found guilty not because of their lack of predictive skills, but because of the inaccurate and incomplete communication that hid the fact that a residual risk of an earthquake indeed existed (Lauta, 2014). This revolutionary sentence was overturned in 2014 with no responsibilities assigned to the IDCP functionaries, except one.
Up to this, the L'Aquila earthquake confirmed that disasters are a complex legislative issue, where responsibilities must be understood and assigned in order to recognise the survivors' demand for justice as legitimate (Lauta, 2014). However, there are cases in which the judicial system in a clumsy attempt to demonstrate fairness takes a turn for the worst. On October 2022 the Court of L'Aquila, while discussing the responsibility for the collapse -on 6th April 2009- of a building and the death of 26 people, found the victims themselves guilty for reckless behaviour since they stayed at home despite the seismic swarms. To demonstrate how three attribution of responsibilities in the aftermath of a disaster is a complex matter, the Court decided to assign and quantify the amount of responsibilities for the death of the 26 people as it follows: the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport partially at fault (30%) for the collapse; the builder of the building (40%); and the victims (30%), for their reckless behaviour related to not leaving the building. They behaved ‘recklessly’ by staying in the only safe place they knew because not only had they been reassured on several occasions by the IDCP, but no alternative plan - hence no real choice - had been drawn up either at local or regional level. This verdict aroused the indignation of the victims’ families and of citizens in L’Aquila that took to the streets to protest against the verdict. The implications of this verdict are potentially deep and, in our view, could set a dangerous precedent with potential implications for future national disaster risk prevention and management strategies.
The verdict is controversial and problematic for several reasons. First, it does not take into account the recounts of the citizens of L'Aquila, who clearly state that the institutions did not take any preparedness measures for public and private buildings, nor prepared any risk communication strategy[1]. Until December 2008, when the seismic swarm began, local communities were unaware of the existence of a ‘preparedness’ plan, and to our knowledge no evidence to the contrary has ever been produced. The local authorities had not taken any action, nor had they shared civil protection or emergency/evacuation plans with the population prior to the earthquake (Imperiale and Vanclay, 2019).
In addition, several reports highlighted the local built environment vulnerabilities due to both its historical development and the political responsibility for downgrading L'Aquila from a higher to a lower seismic risk zone[2], which allowed local builders for years to benefit from favourable conditions regarding building standards and the quality and cost of materials. The case of L’Aquila is therefore a clear example of institutions that have failed to implement large-scale mitigation measures to support individual self-protection capacity (Wisner et al, 2011). Indeed, despite previous earthquakes in the neighbouring regions of Umbria (1997) or Molise (2002) and without any consideration for the seismic history of the L'Aquila province, institutions gave little or no attention to the adoption of structural and non-structural risk mitigation measures. Exposure - 70,000 citizens living in a historic city, with an inadequately adapted building stock, in a highly seismic area- was absent from the institutional discourse on ongoing seismic activity. Vulnerability was only evoked as an index of building resistance and never considered as a social condition (Calandra, 2012). Indeed, in the months preceding the destructive earthquake the building stock was not assessed, while preparedness measures (e.g., provision of temporary facilities for preventive evacuation, assembly areas, evacuation drills) were not put in place. Also, before the earthquake, disaster risk communication activities promoted by local civil protection associations were discontinuous and not integrated into a structured and systematic set of measures aimed at collective capacity building.
In this way, on the eve of 6th April, the citizens of L'Aquila and its province lived in uncertainty, disinformation and fear, but also in the confidence that there would be no destructive earthquake because ‘science had said so’. They coped with the intensification of the tremors through individual interpretation and initiative, because the information they received was fragmentary, unclear and contradictory. Therefore, the behaviour of the victims in Campo di Fossa was perfectly rational, in the face of institutions that deal with generalised fear by urging them to remain calm and stay at home, and in the absence of alternative facilities for safe evacuation. This reveals the necessity to integrate social science in disaster management.
Furthermore, the post-earthquake reconstruction process cannot be reduced to mere physical reconstruction (Centemeri and Tomassi, 2022). It is, instead, a multi-level socio-political process, that must incorporate reparation (Centemeri et al., 2022) as a concept of both symbolic and legal value. In this sense, this verdict questions the status of the victims, since it puts on the same level the institutions (those who have more power on people and places), those who took advantage to create private assets (the builders), and those who eventually paid the highest burden from the earthquake (the victims). This depoliticizes the debate on the urban planning choices to be made on risky and increasingly fragile territories throughout Italy. It also reaffirms the rationalism of social actors - who would always act as informed and identical agents in the material possibilities of choice - as the baseline for public policies aimed more at establishing behavioural norms and exclusively sanctioning these than at transforming the material conditions underlying collective and individual choices.
This slippage from political and institutional responsibility to individual responsibility is not surprising, unfortunately, if placed in the context of a neo-liberal conceptualization of justice and of the state itself, which are openly co-perpetrators of the ecological catastrophe we are experiencing. The verdict once again blames the victims and forgives the state and its institutions. It obfuscates the institutional responsibility for institutional inaction, and stresses the individual responsibilities of the victims, thus reinforcing the individual dimension of vulnerability while denying its systemic, political, and social nature. In a glance, it reinforces a toxic narrative that unacceptably denies the complexity of modern disasters and fails to recognise the legitimate demand for justice by all the victims.
References
Alexander, D. E. (2014). Communicating earthquake risk to the public: the trial of the “L’Aquila Seven”. Natural Hazards, 72(2), 1159-1173.
Calandra, L. M. (2012). Territorio e democrazia. Un laboratorio di geografia sociale nel dopo sisma aquilano. L’UNA edizioni, L’Aquila.
Centemeri, L., and Tomassi, I. (2022), Disasters and catastrophe, in Pellizzoni, L., Leonardi, E. and Asara, V., (Eds.), Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics, Elgar, pp. 232-244.
Centemeri, L., Topçu, S. and Burgess, J. P. (2022). Rethinking Post-Disaster Recovery: Socio-Anthropological Perspectives on Repairing Environments. Routledge.
Ciccozzi, A. (2013). Parola di Scienza Il terremoto e la Commissione Grandi Rischi. Un'analisi antropologica, Derive Approdi.
Engel, K., Frerks, G., Velotti, L., Warner, J., & Weijs, B. (2014). Flood disaster subcultures in The Netherlands: the parishes of Borgharen and Itteren. Natural Hazards, 73(2), 859-882.
Imperiale, A. J., & Vanclay, F. (2018). Reflections on the L’Aquila trial and the social dimensions of disaster risk. Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal, 28(4), 434-445.
Lauta, K. C. (2014). New fault lines? On responsibility and disasters. European Journal of Risk Regulation, 5(2), 137-145.
Wisner, B., Gaillard, J.C., Kelman, I., (2011), ‘Framing disaster’, in The routledge handbook of hazards and disaster risk reduction, pp. 18-33.
[1] https://www.valigiablu.it/terremoto-aquila-sentenza-vittime/
[2] E.g. see the seismic classification of the Abruzzo Region (where L’Aquila is located) and the different scores assigned across years. It clearly shows the downgrading of several councils. http://www.regione.abruzzo.it/zonesismiche/File_pdf/classificazione%20sismica%20comuni%20abruzzesi.pdf