After the L’Aquila Trial

Abstract

On 20 November 2015, the Italian Supreme Court finally brought to an end the so‐called “L’Aquila Trial” (see Appendix A), which concerned a meeting of experts that took place in L’Aquila on 31 March 2009, under the prompt of the Italian National Civil Protection (NCP). For varied reasons, among which certainly was the fact that all official documentation related to the L’Aquila trial was in Italian language, much of the international discussion was based on second hand sources and thus inevitably susceptible to be easily influenced by the spreading of imprecise information (see Appendix B). In this brief opinion paper, we thus try to clarify some issues regarding this controversial case that we feel were not adequately emphasized or touched upon in past discussions on this subject, as well as to share our views on the consequences that this trial has had on the way seismic risk is perceived and acted upon by Italian society. > Some relatives of the L’Aquila earthquake victims pressed charges against participants of an experts meeting that took place a few days before the event. The aforementioned experts meeting was summoned by the Director of NCP at that time, G. Bertolaso, because of the confused situation in the L’Aquila area following a series of “earthquake predictions”—in different locations around the region—made by a local technician, G. Giuliani, working on radon monitoring. The final straw, prompting the meeting the day after, was an ill‐advised press release by the Regional Civil Protection (RCP) of 30 March 2009, where it was stated that “no more shocks are foreseen.” A few days later, on the night of 6 April 2009, an M w 6.3 earthquake struck the L’Aquila town and the subsequent collapse of buildings killed 309 people in the L’Aquila area. Late in 2009, some relatives of the …