Amazing Stupidity: Scientists Arrested For Not Predicting Quake

This is one of the most breathtakingly idiotic and downright scary stories I’ve read.   Persecuting scientists for not predicting something they absolutely cannot predict seems like the kind of thing that might happen in the middle ages.   When I saw the headline I immediately thought it must be coming from some backwater place in Africa or perhaps Haiti.
But no, it’s Italy, a fully industrial country that actually has running water, electricity and where everyone should know better than this.
VIA THE ASSOCIATED PRESS:

Italian scientists arrested over deadly quake
ROME, ITALY -Seven scientists and other experts have been indicted on manslaughter charges for allegedly failing to warn residents sufficiently before an earthquake that killed more than 300 people in central Italy in 2009.
Defence lawyers condemned the charges yesterday, saying it was impossible to predict earthquakes. Seismologists have long concurred, saying no big earthquake has been foretold.
The judge, Giuseppe Romano Gargarella, ordered members of the national government’s great risks commission, which evaluates potential for natural disasters, to go on trial in L’Aquila on September 20.
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The judge reportedly said the defendants ”gave inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” about whether smaller tremors felt in L’Aquila in the six months before the April quake should have constituted grounds for a warning.
Prosecutors focused on a memo issued after a meeting of the commission in March 2009 called because of mounting concerns about seismic activity. The memo – issued a week before the big quake – said experts had concluded a big quake was ”improbable” but could not be excluded.
Commission members later stressed to the media that six months of low-magnitude quakes was not unusual in the highly seismic region and did not mean a big one was coming.
In one interview included in the prosecutors’ case, a commission member, Bernardo De Bernardis, responded to a question about whether residents should just relax with a glass of wine. ”Absolutely, absolutely, a Montepulciano doc,” he replied, referring to a red wine.
Such a reassuring opinion ”persuaded the victims to stay at home”, the indictment reportedly said.
The 6.3-magnitude quake killed 308 people in and around the mediaeval town, which was largely reduced to rubble. Thousands of survivors lived in tent camps or temporary housing for months.
Defence lawyers contend that since earthquakes cannot be predicted, accusations that the commission should have sounded an alarm make no sense.
Although earthquakes cannot be predicted, after Japan’s recent devastating quake experts said an early warning system in place there to detect the Earth’s rumblings before they could be felt helped save countless lives.
But as recently as this month Italy’s national geophysics institute insisted earthquakes could not be predicted in a bid to dispel a widely reported prediction of a huge quake that was due to strike Rome on May 11.

Excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the floor.