7 scientists were sentenced to 6 years in prison for a
mistake that resulted disastrous. “The sentence was pronounced wrongful death, referring
to the fact that the commission gave inaccurate, incomplete and contradictory
about the dangerousness of the situation.” Said the prestigious jurist Stefano
Rodotà, in the newspaper La Repubblica.
First, I shall put into context this piece of news.
This is L’Aquila respect Italy.
Back in 2009 in L’Aquila, Italy, an earthquake
resulted in 309 deaths and about 1600 wounded people. Before the big earthquake
came a group of smaller tremors which were classified as harmless by the Major
Risks Committee. They also said that after those small quakes, it wasn’t likely
to have a bigger one afterwards, so they announced that there was no danger. They
were wrong. On the 5th of April 2009 L’Aquila was shaken by a
devastating earthquake.
Luciano Maiani,
one of the scientists charged, said that this mistake proofs that they work
under a lot of pressure. Although this might be true, their mistake coasted
hundreds of lives and changed the life of all the related people. Now they are
going to pay for their mistake by spending 6 years in prison, they are accused
of murder.
·
- Do you think this is fair?
Now, the governments are working to avoid a similar
mistake. They are looking for alternative ways of announcing information
without alarming unnecessarily the population.
·
- Do you think it’s possible to announce an ‘event’ like an earthquake that might happen without alarming the population?
- How would you do it?
Taking into account that we nowadays have really developed technology which can predict such tremors and answering to your question Julia, I personally think that the horrible mistake which took place could have been avoided or that at least uncertainty could have been removed by warning and drawing the attention to possible earthquake security measures to L’Aquila’s population.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I don’t feel that the murder accusation is fair as I’m sure people who’s constant activity is to predict possible tremors must be under a lot of pressure and can even stress out. We must not forget that even the most important person is human. Leaving aside the debate of what is human and what is not, we can afirm that everybody can and will make mistakes during their life. This is one of the main reasons which leads me to think that, for instance, Luciano Maiani does not deserve to be imprisoned. From my point of view, such a responsability should not rely on a person or a reduced group of people as a little mistake can end up causing a disaster like the one given in L’Aquila.
Answering to your further questions, I think that announcing an event such as an earthquake is very difficult as preventing the population from worrying is totally impossible. In order to announce a tremor or an alarm situation, firstly, a calm and empathic representative should be chosen. Furthermore, I think that instead of warning the population first I would expose the security procedures that should be followed and then I would communicate the possibility of such an event happening.
Marina Gual.
In response to your publication I firstly have to say that I agree with Marina Gual as I consider that with nowadays technology and the development which we can find this kind of errors shouldn’t happen and partially it’s understandable that people want those who have some of the fault in the story to pay for what happened.
ReplyDeleteAlthough 6 years may seem too much I’m sure the Italian legal system has its reasons for doing so. I understand the point of view some people may have in which they disagree with the idea of putting people in jail, but this mistakes have a great weight on society and leave damages behind, not only economically but also socially. We have to take in account that their wasn’t only one scientist in charge of the investigation, there were 7, and it’s very improbable that none of them saw the massive damage the earthquake was going to cause in L’Aquila.
In order to answer the questions purposed I shall say that there have been other cases of earthquakes or natural disasters which have affected other countries and they have managed to advise the population and control them so people don’t get altered. In my opinion the reasonable way of doing this is by trying to control population and not letting them get worried by what can happen, basically the idea would be to give a solution to problems which can occur during and after the disaster. Furthermore I would also recommend as Marina said before, firstly some security bases should be installed and then the warning to the population should be notified.