Italy’s Earthquakes
Today’s New York Times claimed that the intensity of yesterday’s 6.3 magnitude earthquake was “rare” for Italy. Um, really? What is rare in earthquake terms?
In the last century, over 130,000 people died in Italian earthquakes. Just seven years ago, 30 people died in a 5.9 quake in southern Italy. Rare?
We tend to think in human time. To make matters worse, human time has been getting faster ever since media deadlines reached warp speed. So for us, rare means not yesterday…or the day before. But that’s no way to talk about tectonic plates. Two major fault lines carve through Italy, one going west to east and the other running north to south. It is one of the most seismically active places on Earth.
The problem with thinking about earthquakes the way we think about fashion cycles is that we can talk ourselves out of planning for them. We can convince ourselves they are random tragedies no one could have avoided.
This earthquake did not need to be as destructive as it was. Make no mistake. “In California, an earthquake like this one would not have killed a single person,” Franco Barberi, who heads a committee assessing earthquake risks at Italy’s Civil Protection agency, told reporters in L’Aquila. “Once again we are faced with the lack of control on the quality of construction.”
Joe Guerra said on April 07, 2009 at 11:01 pm
Even though rescue operations are in effect and the focus is to save lives in the wake of multiple aftershocks, an equally important activity should be to initiate a real-time after action review. I personally would like to hear more about the effectiveness of the L’Aquila emergency evacuation procedures and a critical assessment of the local Emergency Response Plan..
Italian disaster emergency officials and planners need to be assessing, RIGHT NOW!, their response capability by asking the following questions:
1. What has gone right?
2. What went horribly wrong?
3. What could have been done better?
4. What phase of the response exceeded expectations?
5. What lessons can be quantified to improve the emergency response capability in preparation for the next disaster?
While Italian first responders are focused on the immediate rescue and recovery operations, Italian emergency response planners have a responsibility, even before the dust settles, to do their homework before the next big one hits the mediterranean “ring of fire”.
Otherwise, the oft stated variation of “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it” is certain to manifest itself.