Italian Seismologists Charged

It looks like you can get sued or thrown in jail for just about anything nowadays and that’s what’s happened to an Italian seismologist who has been accused of manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake in 2009 that killed 308 people.

Enzo Boschi who is the President of the country’s National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology is actually going to have to face trial with six of his fellow scientists and technicians for failing to predict the quake that killed so many.

The judge presiding over the case said that the defendants had supplied “imprecise, incomplete and contradictory information” regarding the quakes.

No scientist in his or her right mind agrees with the courts in this matter. That a scientist could be arrested and tried for manslaughter for not predicting when an earthquake would hit. None of the top seismological nor geological institutions in the world can accurately predict when and where an earthquake may occur and they argue that the Italian Government and courts there just don’t understand what the scientists were doing.

It could be just the awareness level of the courts and population has them targeting the scientists for the tragedy and not realizing that most people who die from quakes die from bad or faulty building construction.

This will be an interesting trial to watch if it does make it to trial. It has the specter of classic Italian scientific trials like those of Galileo and Copernicus.

Category: Italian News