Frank Robert
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- Feb 18, 2021
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From the article:Six Italian scientists and a government official have been sentenced to six years in prison over statements they made prior to a 2009 earthquake that killed 309 in the town of L'Aquila.
SOURCE
"Our ability to predict earthquake hazards is, frankly, lousy," Seth Stein, a professor of Earth sciences at Northwestern University in Illinois, told LiveScience then. "Criminalizing something would only make sense if we really knew how to do this and someone did it wrong."
Knowing whether small quakes are foreshocks for a larger temblor is impossible, according to seismologists. A 1988 study of other quake-prone Italian regions found, for example, that about half of large quakes were preceded by weaker foreshocks. But only 2 percent of small quake swarms heralded a larger rupture.
The scientists made a mistake of not making the risks from "small quake swarms" known but a 2 percent risk probably would not have convinced many people to leave.
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