Earthquake in L'Aquila, NE of Rome

[GhostOfClayton]

Not only is this a severe miscarriage of justice, it is a genuine concern. It all boils down to the Scientists' understandable reluctance to 'Cry Wolf'. After all, we're not dealing with absolutes where earthquakes are concerned. At best we're dealing with statistical likelihoods.

 

So, having seen that verdict, imagine the scientists monitoring Vesuvius, which is mostly accepted as a dormant volcano as opposed to an exitnct one, and looms over one of the most populated areas of Italy. Their threshold for warning of impeding doom has now been lowered significantly. They're far more likely to shout "get out of here, she's going to blow" than "let's just sit tight, it'll be OK, I'm sure". I don't even know what the plan would be in the event of an imminent eruption of Vesuvius (I doubt there is one), but it's now far more likely to come into play.

 

Also, the Judge and Jury were all local people. Surely that can't be fair, can it?

[caesar novus]

Not only is this a severe miscarriage of justice, it is a genuine concern. It all boils down to the Scientists' understandable reluctance to 'Cry Wolf'. After all, we're not dealing with absolutes where earthquakes are concerned. At best we're dealing with statistical likelihoods.

 

I had thought this imprisonment for faulty earthquake prediction might be an exception. Now I just saw the Italian legal system condemned by aviation experts as the worst in the entire world for assigning proper blame for airplane accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerolinee_Itavia_Flight_870#Dramatization . What happened to the legacy of Roman law?

 

National Geographic covered a 1980 Italian airline crash with rumors of a missile strike based on faulty reconstruction of the airplane and misreading the radar history. By 1994 it had been been clearly and officially proven as a bomb in the bathroom... another bomb blew up a rail station at the same Bologna point of departure shortly afterwards. But Italian supreme court in 2013 buried the bomb report and awarded a hundred million euros based on the missile conspiracy theory.

 

I believe that national geographic investigative series also disputed Italian findings of their worst airline disaster in Milan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linate_Airport_disaster where many prison sentences were given out. Not mentioned in this article is the way passengers maybe needlessly died because nobody noticed their burning wreck at the end of the runway... I may misremember tho.

 

Maybe I shouldn't complain. I took only one domestic airline flight in Italy. I asked a travel agent how much from Rome to Venice and he typed, paused, checked again, and said Alitalia flight is free! And it was. The ups and down of serendipity Italian style.