Head of Italy disaster body quits in protest at quake ruling

ROME: The head of Italy’s top disaster body quit in protest Tuesday after seven of its members were sentenced to six years in jail for manslaughter for underestimating the risks of a deadly 2009 earthquake.
Luciano Maiami told the ANSA news agency he had resigned as head of the Major Risks Committee because “there aren’t the conditions to work serenely,” a day after the watershed ruling that sent shockwaves through the international scientific community.
The seven defendants are appealing Monday’s ruling by the court in the medieval town of L’Aquila in central Italy, an area devastated by the April 2009 quake that killed 309 people. Maiami, one of Italy’s top physicists and a former head of top practical physics laboratory Cern in Geneva, criticized the verdict as “a big mistake.”
“These are professionals who spoke in good faith and were by no means motivated by personal interests, they had always said that it is not possible to predict an earthquake,” he told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
“It is impossible to produce serious, professional and disinterested advice under this mad judicial and media pressure. This sort of thing doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world,” he said.
“This is the end of scientists giving consultations to the state.” All seven defendants were members of the Major Risks Committee which met in L’Aquila on March 31, 2009 — six days before the 6.3-magnitude quake devastated the region, killing 309 people and leaving thousands homeless.
Under the Italian justice system, the seven remain free until they have exhausted two chances to appeal the verdict, but the ruling has sparked outrage among the world’s scientists who say it has set a dangerous legal precedent.
Maiami said the committee’s deputy head was also set to resign.
The verdict has provoked deep anger and concern in the global science community, with top experts warning of the repercussions.
Michael Halpern of the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists said that without the right to speak freely and independently, they become vulnerable to scapegoating and persecution.
“Scientists need to be able to share what they know — and admit what they do not know — without the fear of being held criminally responsible should their predictions not hold up,” he said in a blog.
The seven Italians will appeal their sentence in hearings set for the final months of 2013, according to Marcello Melandri, lawyer for Enzo Bosci, who was the head of Italy’s national geophysics institute (INGV) at the time of the quake.