Italy’s disaster management chief quits

The head of Italy’s disaster body, Luciano Maiani, has resigned to protest against prison sentences passed on seven colleagues over the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila, the BBC reports.

Six scientists and an ex-official were convicted of multiple manslaughter for giving a falsely reassuring statement.

Prof. Maiani, a physicist, said the Serious Risks Commission could not work “in such difficult conditions”.

The 6.3 magnitude quake killed 309 people and left the city in ruins.

Prof. Maiani’s decision to quit was announced by the Italy’s Civil Protection department, which said the commission’s vice-president, Mauro Rosi, and emeritus president Giuseppe Zamberletti had also tendered their resignations.

“The situation created by yesterday’s sentence is incompatible with running the commission’s work in a calm and efficient manner and with its role of giving high level advice to the organs of the state,” Maiani said in a statement on the department’s website.

“These are professionals who spoke in good faith and were by no means motivated by personal interests, they had always said that it is not possible to predict an earthquake,” he told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

“This is the end of scientists giving consultations to the state,” warned Prof Maiani, a world-renowned physicist who was director general of the Cern nuclear research centre in Switzerland from 1999-2003.

The group, all members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Serious Risks, were accused of having provided “inaccurate, incomplete and contradictory” information about the danger of the tremors felt ahead of the April 6, 2009 quake.

At a meeting a few days before the deadly quake, they had told officials in L’Aquila that, while a major earthquake was not impossible, it was not likely.

On the night of the quake, many people are said to have remained in their homes and died because of the advice, while others who had decided to remain outside in the street survived.

In their closing statements at the trial in L’Aquila on Monday, prosecutors quoted a witness whose father died.

Guido Fioravanti called his mother straight after the first tremor. “I remember the fear in her voice. On other occasions they would have fled but that night, with my father, they repeated to themselves what the risk commission had said. And they stayed.”

However, the six-year jail sentences have shocked the scientific community.

The prestigious science journal, Nature, said “the verdict is perverse and the sentence ludicrous”.

It called for protests against the sentence’s severity and at scientists being criminalised “for the way their opinions were communicated”.

Leading political figures in Italy suggested that the case had blurred the lines between science and public life.

“The risk is that doubt will no longer be allowed to form part of scientific judgement,” Interior Minister Anna Maria Cancellieri said. “The role of science is not the same as politics or administration.”

The speaker of the lower house of the Italian parliament, Gianfranco Fini, was more blunt in his assessment of the verdict: “I trust it will be corrected on first appeal.”

Wednesday 24 October 2012

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