Reply #2: EarthMagazine is picking up a story that's two weeks old, about [View All]

[struggle4progress]

comments made by the public prosecutor in L'Aquila, a town of perhaps 75K

I can't get much detail from the press a few weeks back

I suppose a small town prosecutor could be ignorant enough to believe seismologists could predict with unerring accuracy whether or not a quake was immanent, though it seems very unlikely to me that the Italians could be ignorant enough as a group to allow a prosecution to go forward on the simple theory of the inerrancy of seismology: it is, after all, the country that produced Marconi and Fermi

Or it might be the case that the prosecutor's comments were based, not on an incorrect on some alleged actual dereliction of an official duty, such as failure to carry out a required analysis timely -- which could provoke some outrage when people subsequently died

I guess the story's worth following, but I wouldn't expect a manslaughter prosecution