Guest Post: Earthquakes – Who’s at fault?
This week, gapingwhole has a special treat for you. We recently ran a contest and solicited guest contributions (and by ‘solicited’, we mean that westwood assigned 70+ brilliant people to write a blog post and selected the best). Regardless, we are pleased to introduce one of the three fantastic winning posts! Keep reading for a great exposé of a rather, ahem, ‘shaky‘ situation. ________________________________
Earthquakes – Who’s at fault?
by Kitch
A group of Italian experts, including scientists and one former government official, recently went on trial for manslaughter for ‘not warning the public aggressively enough’ about an upcoming earthquake that ended up killing more than 300 people. Read about it here.
One of the most characteristic features of earthquakes is that they’re random and unpredictable. Have you ever heard of an earthquake that’s been predicted accurately, with enough warning time to evacuate the area? Probably not, because there hasn’t been one.
We can safely say that along tectonic boundaries an earthquake will probably happen, at some point, somewhere along that boundary. We can’t really say much more than that because scientists don’t know enough about the Earth’s tectonic processes.
So, does it really make sense to charge scientists with manslaughter for failing to warn the public against something unpredictable? To hold someone at fault (pun intended) for not predicting an earthquake is ridiculous – no one knows how to do it right! Admittedly, the primary issue that the experts are on trial for is not just failing to predict the earthquake, but also failing to communicate the risk with the public. Two of the experts on trial had told the public that there was little to no risk of a large quake happening, which apparently lulled the residents of the area into a false sense of security so they didn’t evacuate. Really, is this what they’re on trial for?
Use your head.
If you choose to live in an area that’s seismically active and well known for earthquake activity, you should know the risks of living there. You should also know that earthquakes are pretty much impossible to predict, and there is always a risk that one could happen. How can the scientists be blamed for failing to warn them if they should already be aware of the danger they put themselves in by living in that area? If we can criminally charge someone for not predicting this earthquake, leading to 300+ deaths, who do we hold responsible for the 2011 Japan earthquake that caused a massive tsunami? How about the 2010 earthquake in Haiti? Both of those quakes caused much more damage and thousands more fatalities than this one, but no one is being blamed for not predicting these, or ‘not warning the public aggressively enough’.
Who is to blame for the 300 000+ deaths and destruction caused by the 2010 Haiti earthquake?
That’s because shit happens. It’s ridiculous to hold someone responsible for failing to warn people against something that’s unpredictable. Sometimes things are out of our control. Instead of trying to blame someone for it, just deal with it.
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Filed under: politics, science | 9 Comments
Tags: earthquakes, Itality, L'aquila, manslaughter, seismology, trial
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Recent Comments
Haha happy to read something on this – it’s an issue I’ve thought about since it happened. What it comes back to (for me) is what sort of presence this trial sets. What else will scientists be held liable for if these guys are persecuted?
It’s easier to try and blame people for natural disasters than accept that there are still huge parts of the earth that we cannot control, and that (because of our populations and favoured places of living) will kill people – and that it’s almost unavoidable. I live where I live because I don’t want to be killed by volcanoes, tsunamis or earthquakes. Sure we get floods, but we see them coming – and plan/act accordingly.
There is blame within countries who allow lousy construction work, especially in high risk areas like ‘the rift’ region in the Middle East. Take Turkey who is a high risk country, allows building law loopholes that have been around since the Ottoman Empire; that allow ‘over night house construction’ (in other words, if you can build your whole house overnight the gov isn’t allowed to tear it down) and then when the earth shakes everything comes toppling down.
We can’t control seismic activity but in risk zones we can control building regulations and reaction task forces.
I think we have perhaps had a serious misrepresentation of science in the media. Probabilities are really hard for people to understand and there are numerous examples of this inability. But people want certainty and it doesn’t really exist anywhere. And yet, we see headlines saying “mobile phones cause cancer!” and “Eating bacon ups your risk of bowel cancer by 20%!” because journalists and their readers don’t understand the basis upon which these results were offered. This seems to make the conclusions of research quantifiable in a cause-effect kind of way, rather than a relative and probabilistic way. Hence it begins to appear that pronouncements on matters scientific are assertions of certain knowledge when really they are just tentative conclusions drawn from data.
And had they “predicted” an earthquake and everyone evacuated at huge cost and disruption, and an earthquake not appeared, they would have been derided and blamed and possibly sued for the cost of the evacuation.
The solution would appear to be better education not just in science but in critical thinking in general. Its bad enough that George down the pub doesn’t have even the slightest inkling about how to evaluate information correctly, but when politicians are just as scientifically illiterate, especially in a civilisation built on science and technology, then we are bound to get this kind of modern witch trial.
Blaming human beings for natural disasters is a way to comfort ourselves in the fact that we have control over those things. Accepting that we are completely helpless in the face of an earthquake (or any other natural disaster) is distressing. So we choose the easy, comforting explanation. Even if it makes no sense.
At least we are not self-flagellating in atonement to an angry god who we believe we have offended to the extent he made the earth shake. Its progress of a sort to blame other humans. Or is my logic now as bonkers as theirs ?
Give us a few more centuries and we’ll become lucid enough to see natural disasters for what they are: natural disasters.
Witty and wise. Loved it!
Well written post!!
I must admit there have been a few times that I have wanted to charge the local weather forecasters with incompetence! I was friends with one of the local meteorologists and told him how I had read an article about how hard the weather is to predict especially more than two days out due to chaos theory and he replied, “Oh no, it’s easy to predict!” At that point I was making the noose! Really, if you want a useless job that pays, get the weather gig! Much safer than seismology no doubt.