May 30 2011
Seismologists Charged with Manslaughter
The Italian Government has charged their top seismologists with manslaughter because they failed to predict the devastating 2009 earthquake, which killed 308 people. The scientists, and the seismology community, are stunned – primarily because it’s impossible to predict earthquakes.
On it’s surface the story is pretty sensational and downright silly:
Judge Giuseppe Romano Gargarella said that the seven defendants had supplied “imprecise, incomplete and contradictory information,” in a press conference following a meeting held by the committee 6 days before the quake, reported the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
That may have something to do with the fact that earthquake science is imprecise, incomplete, and often produces contradictory information. The scientists and their colleagues are calling this a witch hunt and warn that it will have a chilling effect on scientists, a very real concern.
I have to say, however, that I get the uneasy feeling that I am not getting the entire story. The media (at least the English-speaking media) are telling one story – the government is going after scientists for not predicting the impossible to predict. This may, in fact, be the actual story. But I wonder if there are some nuances here that we are missing. For example, did the scientists make any irresponsible statements that had nothing to do directly with their ability to predict the quake? I’m just speculating, but this is a story I would not take at face value until more information comes to light.
Regardless of how accurate the report is, it raises some interesting points, the most obvious of which is how should experts be held accountable for their performance. We often call upon experts to give us their expert opinion, and sometimes the stakes are very high. This happens in medicine every day – in any applied science. We cannot fault experts for not being perfect, for not foreseeing the unforeseeable, and for not having crystal balls. We do expect them to be honest and transparent about their uncertainty.
We can require that they meet minimal standards of competence. In medicine, this is the “substandard care” criterion. We don’t blame doctors for bad outcomes (many of which are unavoidable) or for the limits of our current knowledge and technology. In order for a doctor to be held liable for their practice they had to have been practicing demonstrably below the standard of care.
We can apply this here – did the top seismologists of Italy commit scientific malpractice in their assessment of the risk of a large quake? By all accounts, the answer is no.
Another relevant issue here is the balance between warning the public about credible risks, while not panicking them. In this case the Italian seismologists said, in effect, that the recent tremors were not necessarily sign of a big quake in the near future. There still might not be a big quake for years. But, they warned, a big quake is coming eventually. That sounds like a fair assessment of the science.
We don’t want to cause unnecessary concern, or disrupt society with constant warnings about potential disasters. At the same time, we do want people to be prepared for possible disasters. There may also be times when we can predict that a catastrophe is imminent, and then we will want to get the information out along with specific instructions.
Apparently, the judge did not like the balance that these scientists struck:
The charges filed by the prosecution contends that this assessment “persuaded the victims to stay at home”, La Repubblica newspaper reported.
But defense for the scientists claim that they never said anything akin to – there is no risk.
Again – this is a case study in how such risks are to be presented to the public. The way I see it you are always at cross-purposes and have to compromise – the more you warn the public, the more prepared they will be, but the more panicked they will be. The less you warn them, the calmer but less prepared they will be.
I think scientists, especially a consensus of recognized experts, should be free to express their scientific assessment to the public, without fear of being the target of later litigation (unless they really did commit scientific malpractice). Politicians and regulatory agencies should take their cue from the scientific community, but may want to also add their own spin in order to tweak the balance between reassurance and preparedness.
Perhaps what we have here is the government covering their butts by blaming the scientists, when no one was to blame. It was an unpredictable natural disaster. Learn from it for the next time.
20 Responses to “Seismologists Charged with Manslaughter”
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This is a nitpick, but I’d like to point out that earthquakes are only impossible to predict currently. While we may never be able to predict earthquakes with 100% certainty, there’s no reason to believe that, with better seismological tools and better models, we won’t be able to create at least somewhat reliable forecasts.
To be clear, I’m not saying that we should be charging seismologists for getting this wrong. We don’t charge meteorologists for failing to predict tornadoes, after all.
I think what this does is that it demonstrates what the real reasons for the criminal justice system are. Prosecuting the seismologists for something they could not possibly do is akin to prosecuting witches for things that they could not possibly do. It isn’t about incentivizing correct behavior it is about using the power of the State to lower the status of those the prosecutors don’t like.
My speculation is that in this case it is being done to divert attention away from building construction and compliance with building codes. It is cheaper to scrimp on materials and build weaker structures that can’t withstand earthquakes. That is why there are building codes. But those codes need to be enforced or they are not followed. Often bribes are paid so inspections are not as rigorous and so don’t uncover construction that is not up to code. Contractors savvy enough to pay bribes to the right people are also savvy enough to keep records implicating those they paid bribes to if the shoddy work is ever uncovered.
The linked to article even says that manslaughter charges from shoddy construction are not uncommon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/world/europe/08codes.html
The head of the committee on earthquake risks said it was due to shoddy construction, and that if an earthquake of this magnitude had hit California there would not have been a single death.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2009/04/07/us-italy-quake-buildings-idUKTRE5364T720090407
My guess is that because the death toll was so high they had to find someone else to blame, someone outside the construction/legal enforcement area and the seismologists were a convenient target.
I honestly thought you were joking, then in denial I was thinking satire, then my girlfriend confirmed it and it made me a bit sick.
“wtf” is about all I can say on this :/
If I was a weatherman in Italy I’d be nervously packing my bags…
Ori, it is likely that just like the weather earthquakes are to some extent chaotic and inherently unpredictable.
Earthquakes do follow a power law distribution in energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
just like avalanches, earthquakes exhibit self-organized criticality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality
Systems at the critical point are differentially sensitive to perturbations. Self-organized critical systems self-organize themselves until they are at a critical point. That is what a sand pile does, organize itself into a critical state. At the critical point of a sand pile, the size of avalanche is unpredictable. A single falling grain of sand may activate no avalanche or may activate a large avalanche.
Just like the weather exhibits the butterfly effect, earthquakes may well exhibit the “stamping child” effect where the vibrations produced by a stamping child interact with other vibrations and cause one earthquake or another to happen.
I think the bribery angle is the right one. I have heard lots of stories from people who lived or visited Italy about bribery, and corruption in general, being extremely common.
@TigerPilot
“If I was a weatherman in Italy I’d be nervously packing my bags…”
- ROFLMAO
This is stunning, if true. Italy is just over the Adriatic pond from me and I’m very interested in this particular story. The l’Aquila quake is still very fresh in our minds.
Ori,
What you are saying is that earthquakes are predictable in principle. I think that is true. That, however, doesn’t mean that they will ever be predictable in practice. The model would have to include so much data that the program wouldn’t run in real time.
So what this all boils down to is that these individuals are being punished for being passionate about geology and seismology, excelling in their field of study, and being in the positions they were in at the time the quake struck.
This is appalling. It would be just as useful to go after the vatican for not warning the public about god’s intentions ahead of time, or any local psychics who should have known as well… wait, why aren’t they doing that first?
This stunning story is born because a technician a few days before the earthquake warn people of the imminent earthquake. His name is Giampaolo Giuliani and he use an instrument for the measure of radon emissions from the earth’s crust. While scientists disprove his theories, the catastrophe occurred.
For months in Italy, Giuliani was the man who made the prediction of earthquake and scientist the skeptics that have caused hundreds of casualties…
http://www.corriere.it/cronache/09_aprile_06/previsioni_terremoto_giuliani_aac2c71e-2273-11de-9ce1-00144f02aabc.shtml
daedalus2u:
What you’re saying is true, certainly, but we’re still able to construct useful, if not complete, meteorological forecasts. All I’m saying is that I don’t believe geology is fundamentally different, and that as the science improves, we may be able to generate useful predictions about seismological phenomena.
It just seems a bit of an exaggeration to say that predicting earthquakes – an unqualified statement that does not speak to the quality of any particular earthquake prediction – is impossible.
Again, I’m really not trying to say that we should be able to or ever will be able to pinpoint the exact time and magnitude of any quake, or that scientists should be punished for incorrect predictions, or that any of the various pseudoscientific quake predictors that abound should be listened to. I just think throwing around the word impossible is a little much.
I agree. Insisting on unknowability is unwise in most domains, as in this one. However, that isn’t to say that the prospect isn’t *ridiculously* difficult.
In any case, this radon gas thing seems highly correlative but not very useful in predictions.
I am not saying it is impossible, but it is not something that it is reasonable to expect a straightforward solution to. We know it is highly non-linear. Non-linear problems are extremely difficult to model once they have more than a few parameters. Most earthquakes occur deep underground, this one occurred 9.46 km underground. To model and understand when the fault is going to slip, the actual state of the fault needs to be known. Unless they had equipment at the actual fault measuring what was going on, there is no credible way they could have predicted this.
There are reports of luminous phenomena, but what they are and how they relate to earthquakes is not known.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L%27Aquila_earthquake
These reports are anecdotes. Without knowing what is the physics behind them, it is hard to couple them to rock slip 9 km underground.
With weather forecasts, weather is happening in the atmosphere where there are measurements of what is going on. The atmosphere moves and to some extent the air that will be over a place on one day was somewhere else before and those motions are (to some extent known). There is no corresponding access to the faults that are building up strain and will eventually slip.
I saw the same thing happen in England about 20 years ago. A massive storm swept across the island and caused damage to trees and gardens that will take the better part of a century to repair. And, soon after things calmed down, there was a similar witch hunt to hold meteorologists responsible for not properly predicting the storm and its severity.
Like that would have made a difference.
Sadly, humanity doesn’t seem to like being told that there is no certainty. People want science to behave like magic and explain everything without error or doubt. They want infallibility, and if they don’t get it they may scapegoat science the same way they did with witches centuries ago.
Ironic, neh?
I have and idea for Jon Ronson’s next book:
‘The Men Who Blame Scapegoats’
daedalus2u:
The answer is robots. A swarm of tiny, subterranean robots that can relay seismographic information up to scientists and computers. Totally ridiculous and implausible at present, but just one possibility for the future.
Actually, Ori, you are not that far off of reality. Seismologists are using GPS sensors to relay ground movement:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/monitoring/gps/
While they cannot predict earthquakes, it is just part of the gathering of information.
Dr. Novella wrote: “the more you warn the public, the more prepared they will be, but the more panicked they will be.”
I hope this isn’t true. I know one major narrative to come out of Japan recently was about how calmly everyone behaved during the tsunami, because they were hyper-prepared.
The reason for the trial is that, despite earthquake swarms that should justify a state of alert (as they have in the past), nothing was done. Apparently there was discussion to this effect before the announcement of ‘no worries’.
So, in essence, they are being tried for negligence.
The notion that they are being tried for not predicting the earthquake is not true.
http://www.regione.emilia-romagna.it/geologia/forumntc/showAttachment.asp?id=4210
Sonic – after reading more reports, it seems like it’s both. It is partly the fact that they did not predict the quake. It’s also that a technician did predict the quake, based upon bad science, but then just got (somewhat) lucky in his prediction. So while he was spreading unjustified fear, the seismologists tried to calm that fear with a better interpretation of the science – but then, as luck would have it, the quake struck. That seems to have generated the sense that the lack of reaction was the fault of the seismologists. But it stems from how the science can and cannot be used to predict quakes.