Ian Main
speaker
30 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2012
last heard Apr 2013
Ian Main’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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That's
a cultural response, most likely to the recent court case.
Obviously, the authorities are going to be very conservative.
If I was a seismologist in Italy, I would probably be very conservative myself in issuing risks.
But there's a danger in that.
I mean, you protect yourself that way, but you're not giving out the best information.
An overreaction isn't a good reaction.
There were reports of people evacuating their houses, taking their kids off school.
So these are quite big actions that people are taking based on small events that are essentially happening very regularly in this part of Italy.
Sadly, some 300 people died, most of them in a single building in a student dormitory in the Lake Willow event, in a town of a population of about 100,000.
So your probability of being killed in that earthquake was 1,000 times that ratio, that vulnerability, if you like.
So the actual risk of being killed in that earthquake was something like three in a million, with a big uncertainty somewhere between one and 30, let's say, in a million.
And so that's a significantly elevated risk compared to the background, but still very low in absolute probability terms.
It's equivalent to driving on a motorcycle for on the order of 18 miles, something like that.
More or Less · Predicting L'Aquila Earthquake: is it right to blame the scientists? · 29 Oct 2012
podcast
In another sense, we can forecast that they are almost certain to happen with a very low probability.
maybe once in 100, once in 1,000 years, depending on the size of the earthquake in a given zone.
And that's a hazard that's there all of the time.
A fault can go at any time, but we know it's going to happen.
Yeah.
Yes.
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