Italy: New, old buildings fall in latest earthquake
-Pastor-Dale-Morgan-
Italy: New, old buildings fall in latest earthquake
ROME — Earthquakes in Italy, like the twin temblors that claimed 24 lives this month in northern Italy, trigger a sense of terror and dread but also deja vu.
Again and again, buildings both ancient and new cave in or topple when rocked by quakes that, while strong, aren’t so powerful that they should devastate structures built to meet seismic-safety standards or retrofitted to render them resilient, especially in a relatively affluent country like Italy, one of the most-earthquake prone places in the world.
That’s precisely the problem, geologists and engineers said Wednesday, a day after a 5.8 magnitude quake collapsed churches, factories, apartment houses and barns in the Emilia Romagna area north of Bologna. As a 2008 report by geologists and civil protection experts found, the vast majority of buildings still don’t meet modern seismic safety standards.
Many of the victims in Tuesday’s quake, as well as in a more powerful 6.0 temblor in practically the same area on May 20, were workers crushed in the rubble of relatively new warehouses or factories dotting the countryside of one of Italy’s most industrially and agriculturally productive regions.
The body of the 17th and last victim in Tuesday’s quake was removed from a factory’s rubble on Wednesday in the town of Medolla. Three other workers died in the same collapse.
In 2009, when a 6.3 magnitude temblor rocked the central mountain town of L’Aquila, apartment houses pancaked, church steeples topped, a college dormitory crumbled and a hospital was left largely unusable. Even the government headquarters that should have been helping to co-ordinate rescue efforts fell down.
“We’re seeing the same movie over and over again,” said geologist Gian Vito Graziano, who is president of Italy’s National Geologists Council.
In Japan last week, a 6.1 magnitude struck but did no significant damage, he noted. By way of comparison, in the Emilia Romagna quakes packing lesser punch, roofs and walls of modern factories and warehouses as well as ancient churches caved in.
The quake “danger had been underestimated,” Graziano said in a phone interview. “That the (ancient) towers fell, you can in some way understand,” but the modern structures should not have collapsed, “absolutely not,” he added.
The college dormitory in L’Aquila, for example, was only a few decades old. And the hospital, rendered unsafe by the 2009 quake, had been built after Italy adopted more stringent construction standards for quake-prone areas following the deadly 1980 temblor that hit Naples.
Another quake disaster, the collapse of a school in southern Puglia in 2002, also led to tighter building rules. Investigators examining that wreckage alleged that shoddy construction factored in the tragedy, which claimed 28 lives, including a small town’s entire first grade.
But Graziano said he didn’t think cheap construction techniques were factors in most of Italy’s quake disasters, including in Emilia Romagna.
Rather, builders might not have been aware of the “amplifying
effect” that the sandy soil not far under the surface might have
had on the quake’s effect along the fault line as it nears the
earth’s crust, he said. In some towns, a sandy muck oozed out of
quake-caused fissures in the streets.