Shoddy, price-cutting renovations, in breach of local building regulations, could be partly to blame for the high death toll from this week’s devastating earthquake in central Italy, according to a prosecutor investigating the disaster.
As questions mount over the deaths of nearly 300 people, prosecutor Giuseppe Saieva indicated that property owners who commissioned suspected sub-standard work could be held responsible for contributing to the quake’s deadly impact.
Saieva, who works in the Rieti region between Rome and the quake’s epicenter, said the tragedy could not simply be filed away as an unavoidable natural disaster.
Photo: AP
“If the buildings had been constructed as they are in Japan they wouldn’t have collapsed,” he told La Repubblica.
Within hours of the quake hitting on Wednesday Saieva was in Amatrice, the small mountain town hit hardest by the temblor.
He was inspecting the damage there before opening a preliminary investigation for possible culpable homicide and causing a disaster.
The crushed partition walls of a collapsed three-story villa were among the sights that caught his eye.
“I can only think it was built on the cheap with more sand than cement,” he said.
A number of engineering and architectural experts have highlighted the widespread use of relatively cheap cement beams for house extensions and renovations as a possible factor explaining why so many buildings collapsed.
Heavy and inflexible, the cement beams become deadly if released by shaking because they will crush older walls beneath them with deadly implications.
“If it emerges that individuals cut corners, they will be pursued and those that have made mistakes will pay a price,” the prosecutor said.
The issue of whether some of the deaths could have been avoided is particularly acute in the Amatrice area because it is only 50km from the city of L’Aquila, which was hit by a 2009 earthquake in which over 300 people perished.
An outcry over the shoddy, corrupt building practices which led to so many buildings in the university city being inadequately prepared for a quake led to the national Civil Protection agency making almost 1 billion euros (US$1.12 billion) available for upgrading buildings in quake-vulnerable areas.
However, the take-up of grants has been low. Critics blame bureaucracy but others maintain that independent-minded villagers always find the cheapest way of getting their renovations done, whatever the risks.
About 40 percent of Italians, 24 million people, live in zones vulnerable to earthquakes and the risk that entails has been a subject for the country’s finest minds for centuries.
However, experts say protecting Italy’s architectural heritage is far from straightforward.
“If we start from the idea of upgrading every old building to comparable safety levels of a modern building built to anti-seismic norms, we have to accept that we will never get there,” said Paolo Bazzurro, a professor in construction techniques at the University of Pavia.
The trend away from traditional wooden roofs and beams is not the only problem: widening window openings and the removal of reinforcing chains embedded in walls have also contributed.
“These things make buildings more vulnerable,” Bazzurro said.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi vowed to rebuild the hilltop villages devastated by the quake.
For houses built before anti-seismic measures became the norm in 1970, it is relatively easy to install shock absorbers, experts said.
However, a comprehensive solution will not come cheap.
Italian Minister of Infrastructure and Transport Graziano Delrio was asked last week how much it would cost to bring every building in Italy up to modern anti-quake standards.
It would cost 360 billion euros, he said.
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