An Evaluation of the Recovery Strategy after the 6 April 2009 Earthquake in L'Aquila, Central Italy

Background

In physical terms, the earthquake of 6 April 2009 at L'Aquila was a moderate seismic event. The Irpinia earthquake of 23 November 1980 released 5.6 times more energy, and it thus affected an area ten times as large. However, the very high level of vulnerability of built structures in L'Aquila meant that the effect of the 2009 event was disproportionately serious. It was thus the worst seismic disaster to occur in Italy for 29 years. As a result, it can be regarded as a test of the national civil protection system in its current form and also an opportunity to appraise the evolution of national policies, organisation and techniques for managing the recovery from large disasters.[1] This article evaluates the response to the disaster with particular reference to the medium term and the use of transitional housing.

The Irpinia-Basilicata earthquake of 1980 was not only as a major national disaster, it was also as the dawn of a new era of civil protection. At the time, Law no.996 of 1970, governing emergency response, had not been fully enacted and hence the system was far from complete, even in the rudimentary manner of the time. However, the Friuli earthquakes of 1976 had given valuable experience in how to cope with large catastrophes, including the organisation of hospital response to mass casualty situations, relief columns, prefabricated shelter and the use of a relief commissar to direct operations. Nevertheless, in Irpinia the response was far from efficient. It took another quarter of a century to create a system composed of trained, equipped volunteers and professional workers organised into a coherent network of managers and responders, centrally directed and equipped with modern communications.

The abolition of conscription in the Italian armed forces effectively deprived the civil protection system of a well of autonomous manpower that had to be compensated for by increasing the training and equipment of the country's 3,600 civil protection volunteer forces. The new system, bolstered by the federalism inherent in the 'Bassanini' decree-law of 1998 (DL 112, articles 107 and 108) took responsibility from the prefects and gave it to the regions and provinces, leading to an uneasy compromise between central state and devolved entities. Nonetheless, it worked, not least because the L'Aquila emergency was nowhere near as large as past and potential earthquake disasters further south. Hence, in many respects the real test is yet to come, and the strategy employed at L'Aquila is likely to be a poor guide to how it will be managed.

Immediate response: hours to days

The response to the developing emergency in L'Aquila involved a doctrine akin to that used in the invasion of Baghdad, namely overwhelming force.[2] Civil protection and emergency medical structures in Abruzzo Region were extremely weak and the national response effectively sidelined them and replaced them with resources drawn from the entire nation and dominated by the regions and provinces that are most powerful in terms of civil protection, notably Trento, Roma, Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy. Although the response confirmed the primacy of the National Fire Brigades as the country's principal emergency responder—i.e. the lead agency—the failure of local systems meant that the first and most urgent need, treatment of seriously injured victims, had to be accomplished by military means using techniques developed for the evacuation of wounded soldiers from battlefields, or medevac.[3]

The early response to the disaster established and consolidated a policy that was to have profound effects on the longer-term emergency, namely the supplanting of local authority by the national hierarchy.[4] Although, in legal terms, the mayors of municipalities are the ultimate civil protection authorities, in the province of L'Aquila the Department of Civil Protection, and in places the Italian Armed Forces, commanded. This included the crucial decision to translocate the entire population of L'Aquila and of the centres of other towns, the first time in modern Italian history that a major city has been totally and mandatorily evacuated.

The division of the affected area into seven districts, managed from a national DiComaC (Centre of Direction for Command and Control), established a geographical pattern based on the cascading principle of command centres, in which the Mixed Operations Centres (COMs) in larger settlements act as points of reference for the Municipal Operations Centres (COCs) in the smaller towns.

The initial operation succeeded in that, by saturating the area with rescuers and ensuring that they were well coordinated, the main problems were overcome. These included the need to re-establish medical care, given serious damage to San Salvatore, the region's main hospital (two field hospitals were used), the need to protect the public by interdicting areas of structural collapse, and the need to provide food and shelter to the survivors.

Short term: the first six months

Earthquakes are the archetypical sudden impact disasters, in that they occur virtually without warning and can instantly leave very large numbers of people homeless.[5] In the case of L'Aquila, about 67,000 residents suffered this fate. In most instances, there is a transition from improvised shelter (cars, buses, undamaged public buildings, etc.) to transitional settlement and then to reconstructed permanent housing. The transitional shelter may involve a sequence in its own right, for example using caravans (trailers) and then prefabricated buildings. Commonly, the passage from improvised shelter to the first transitional housing is completed within a few days or weeks.[6]

The decision to accommodate survivors of the L'Aquila earthquake in tents and hotels for six months was unusual in comparison with practice elsewhere in the world. Climatically, the prolonged use of tents was feasible, as the period spanned the spring and summer, although there were problems of very high temperatures in mid-summer and intense rainstorms with localised flooding. The 171 tent camps were mostly small, self-contained entities set up in any available local space within or near to the damaged settlements. In some cases, heavy-handed security measures led residents to complain of being cooped up in lagers, but essentially the policy worked. It was nonetheless hard going to live for half a year in an eight-person tent.

By accident or design, about one third of the survivors found their own accommodation, one third were accommodated in tents and the remainder went into hotels. The problem with this last category was that most of the hotel accommodation was located close to the Adriatic Sea coast at considerable distance from L'Aquila and separated from it by the natural barrier of the Gran Sasso mountain, the highest in Apennine Italy. Social surveys revealed that many adults suffered from a sense of abandonment and disorientation after prolonged absences, but paradoxically children fared better in the hotels than in the tent camps, as social structure and a sense of community appeared to survive better in the former than in the latter.

During the early phase of the aftermath several problems emerged that were to become chronic later on. One was the degradation of the infrastructure and services of the affected area and another was loss of productive employment. It is axiomatic that recovery from disaster needs sources of work and income.[7] The primary source of these is usually the construction industry, although if recovery does not empower other sectors of the economy the result can be a 'boom' followed by a 'bust' when the reconstruction is either finished or stalls.[8]

It is estimated—unofficially, as official statistics are hard to obtain—that between 16,000 and 26,000 jobs were lost as a result of the L'Aquila earthquake. Faced with loss of accommodation and the abandonment of town centres, professional people left the area in large numbers. School enrolments declined. The main employer in L'Aquila is its university, which was left in a precarious position with all major buildings damaged to a greater or lesser extent. Fiscal incentives for employment have been severely limited and suspension of enrolment fees at the university has barely enabled it to hold its own. Moreover, the devolution of taxation so ardently promoted by successive Italian governments since the 1990s has proved advantageous to some provinces of Italy and fiscally regressive to others. L'Aquila is the worst affected example of the latter. Finally, without improvement of the local infrastructure, the area has suffered economic stagnation and decline.

Medium to long term: months to years

The decision to move the Italian G8 summit from La Maddalena, Sardinia, to L'Aquila was, at the time (July 2009), seen as a gesture of solidarity with the victims of the earthquake. However, it had remarkably little impact on their plight.[2] Upgrades to the local infrastructure were limited to an extremely small area. Funds pledged by foreign powers never materialised as the recession began to bight. However, the spotlight remained on L'Aquila and by the autumn transitional housing was available for 24,000 homeless survivors.

The flagship of the programme is the C.A.S.E. (Complessi Antisismici Sostenibili ed Ecocompatibili) project to construct 184 housing units on 19 sites to accommodate 15,500 residents (Figure 1). These two- or three-storey buildings are base isolated against earthquakes. They are constructed of wood with concrete base plates and steel frames. A more modest solution is provided by the M.A.P. (Moduli Abitativi Provvisori) prefabs erected on more than 50 sites, half of them in the municipality of L'Aquila, and housing 8,500 survivors (Figure 2).[9]

Figure 1. C.A.S.E. three-storey units at Assergi, L'Aquila

.

Figure 2. M.A.P. units and damaged settlement at Villa Sant'Angelo (AQ)

Whereas the price of a basic prefabricated dwelling of 40 sq. m. is about €12,000-15,000, the C.A.S.E. units cost more than 20 times as much, or an average of €280,607 per unit or €3,750 per sq. m., including public spaces.[10] These are remarkably high figures for transitional housing and represent an entirely new policy. The C.A.S.E. policy is a remarkable achievement, the rehousing of more than 15,000 people in new buildings on greenfield sites in only six months, with protection against future earthquake damage. The C.A.S.E. and M.A.P. projects represent the latest evolution and most extravagant form of the prefabricated post-disaster transitional dwelling. There are various unresolved issues with these buildings, listed as follows.

Durability and maintenance. Buildings containing a high proportion of wood require a continuous cycle of maintenance, yet the L'Aquila area does not have experience or a tradition of this. Some uncorrected signs of decay were already apparent after a few months, and the local climate is one of the most extreme in peninsular Italy. One effect of the L'Aquila earthquake has been to cause an abrupt change from stone and concrete construction to building in wood (Figure 3). It remains to be seen what the fire risk will turn out to be, given that traditionally urban areas in peninsular Italy have been of low flammability and hence have not required or obtained large firefighting resources.

Figure 3. Wooden church under construction at Fossa (AQ).

Longevity and future uses. In the plans for the C.A.S.E. and M.A.P. units there is no indication of the intended lifespan of the buildings or of any future use of the units or their sites, other than vague references to 'student housing', which would be inappropriate on such a scale. Such huge investments imply that the transitional housing will span decades rather than years. This is borne out by the fact that remnants of temporary dwellings are still to be found in Messina (1908 earthquake) and Avezzano (1915), as well as in the Belice Valley of western Sicily (1968).

Lack of services and public transport. The C.A.S.E. and M.A.P. accomodate up to 2,500 people at each site, but in almost all cases there are no basic services and there is only very limited public transport. Social cohesion and functional living are not helped by a situation in which all that has been provided is housing and some landscaping.

Isolated sites. At the time of assignment of the units, by far the most popular site was the only one that is located in L'Aquila city itself. Arischia and Assergi are two C.A.S.E. sites that are respectively 15 and 16 km from L'Aquila. Neither are near significant commercial, medical or administrative centres.

Questionable ecological values. The sourcing of materials and use of solar panels may qualify the C.A.S.E. units to be regarded as 'ecocompatible', but the dispersion and isolation of the sites, and the poor quality of public transport have induced a massive dependency on the private car, despite the lack of improvement of the local infrastructure. Moreover, some of the sites have no wastewater treatment facilities. Finally, several are built on conservation land and others are on prime farmland.

Questionable urban values. Much money and effort was expended on landscaping and urbanising the transitional housing sites, with road networks, retaining walls, footpaths, greenery and communal park areas. While this has made for a pleasant environment, although one without any particular local character, it represents a sort of forced modernisation, which entirely breaks with tradition. Given the closure and—one hopes temporary—abandonment of the historical centres, there has been a precipitous loss of the genius loci of the area. It is not clear how much of this can be recovered. At its worst the closure might also represent a form of forced migration. Such a phenomenon is not unknown after modern disasters and was encountered in the southern USA in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina.[11]

Social fragmentation. In the mechanism for assigning the transitional housing units little attention was given to the preservation of the social fabric. The result has been to enhance residents' sense of isolation, abandonment and powerlessness. Social surveys have revealed high levels of post-traumatic stress and depression, especially among women, unemployed people and the elderly. One consequence of the social fragmentation, as observed in social surveys, is an increase in xenophobia and the perception that foreigners have been given privileges in the assignment of housing.

Role of governance.[12] The social fragmentation forms part of a policy that appears to be characterised by divide and rule. Although there are emergent groups of citizens who fight for their rights and for a better future, participatory democracy has not been enhanced by the disaster. Instead, it has been replaced by government paternalism and central direction without significant devolution to local communities.

The fate of the damaged historical centres. A year and a half after the disaster the centre of L'Aquila remained off limits to ordinary citizens. Although there were problems with the removal of 4-5 million tonnes of rubble, it contained some of the most elaborate buttressing ever applied to earthquake-damaged buildings (Figure 4). The use of electro-soldering implies that the buttressing is designed to last for a very long time. Unfortunately, it cannot prevent the decay of the damaged urban fabric, only hold it in place. The result is a completely dysfunctional urban area, with services dispersed or absent, and points of reference left to decay behind the cordons.

Figure 4. Buttressing of a damaged building in L'Aquila city centre.

The context of the disaster

In the L'Aquila earthquake standard patterns of damage to buildings were reproduced an infinitum (Figure 5), suggesting that seismic vulnerability was not only widespread but absolutely endemic. Given the prevalence of earthquakes in the central Apennines, this represents a historical failure to promote and enforce adequate building codes: in fact, until recent revisions of the codes, L'Aquila was placed in the 'moderate seismicity' capacity despite having had, in 1703, an earthquake of estimated magnitude 6.7 that killed at least 6,000 residents and severely damaged most of the city's public buildings. Hence, there was no scientific justification for such laxity, which was doubtless the result of pressure by speculative builders.

Figure 5. Typical form of damage in reinforced concrete apartment building, L'Aquila.

One striking feature of the response to the L'Aquila earthquake is the lack of separation of civil protection from the business of recovery and reconstruction, a situation which is uncommon in other countries. For example, in Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake a special agency was set up to manage the recovery process.[13] In Italy, the national civil protection service seems to go through a cycle of scandals that repeats itself roughly once every ten years. The scandal of 2009-10 concerned the use of ordinances to accomplish public works, thus using emergency measures simply to bypass the stringent and cumbersome bureaucratic anti-corruption controls on the tendering process. Some €10.6 billion had been disbursed in this manner in eight years, some of it with very debatable justification.[4] Involvement of civil protection in the recovery process in L'Aquila thus tainted both sides rather than creating a workable symbiosis.

Disaster risk reduction: the report card

At the world scale, disaster risk reduction and resilience have become fashionable goals, in part thanks to the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) and its Hyogo Framework for Action.[14] This has five priorities for action and it is worth considering how Italy, and L'Aquila, have responded to them.

1. Ensure that disaster risk reduction is a national and a local priority with a strong institutional basis for implementation. An OECD evaluation shows that the institutional basis is strong in Italy at the national level but fragmentary and inadequate below that.1 This is particularly true of Abruzzo Region, where resources either do not exist or have not been sufficiently devoted to the problem. Only a handful of Italy's 8,104 municipalities have comprehensive disaster reduction plans, despite the fact that no other European country is as severely afflicted by calamity. In contrast to many other European countries, neither nationally nor locally is disaster risk reduction and the creation of resilience a significant priority.

2. Identify, assess and monitor disaster risks and enhance early warning. In fundamental terms, risk is composed of two components: hazard and vulnerability. Hazard recognition and monitoring are highly developed in Italy, and that applies to the sector of the central Apennines in which L'Aquila is located. Vulnerability assessment is much less well developed and the is usually only applied to physical vulnerabilities (i.e. the probabilities of structural collapse), not socio-economic ones. At the international level, many experts regard vulnerability as the dominant component of disaster risk.[15]

3. Use knowledge, innovation and education to build a culture of safety and resilience at all levels. Although civil protection has made considerable progress in recent years, and through voluntarism this has involved a proportion of the general public, there is little sign that a culture of safety and resilience is being created. Although there are initiatives to sensitise school children against risks, civil protection and disaster risk reduction are not part of the standard curriculum. Protection structures were particularly weak in Abruzzo at the time of the earthquake and remain so.

4. Reduce the underlying risk factors. This would require considerable investment in structural and non-structural measures. Although there has been some progress in structural protection, much remains to be done. Very little progress has been made in the implementation of non-structural measures. Business continuity management (BCM), for example, is almost completely lacking in large parts of Italy. The effects of this in L'Aquila meant that employment which could have been saved was lost.

5. Strengthen disaster preparedness for effective response at all levels. Some progress is being made, notably in the more progressive regions, such as Friuli Venezia-Giulia, Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy and Sicily. However, much remains to be done.

One can conclude from this brief evaluation that the disaster risk reduction situation in Italy is not promising. It is particularly bleak in Abruzzo. Above all there is a pervasive lack of planning and a corresponding inability to set strategic priorities for resilience.

Lessons learned?

Many publications include "lessons learned" in their titles.[16] However, to be truly learned a lesson must be both practically useful and incorporated in order to create better practice. That is too seldom the case.

The resettlement policy in L'Aquila has led to the replication of a number of problems that were encountered in other countries, notably Turkey, in the 1970s and at the time represented lessons genuinely to be learned.[17] One was the importance of planning in an integrated manner for all stages of the 'disaster cycle': mitigation (risk reduction), preparedness (including prediction and warning), emergency response, recovery and reconstruction. In Italy there is a tendency not to plan and not to understand the purpose of planning, which should enable rather than restrict by coordinating the rational use of resources. Another problem concerns the functionality of transitional settlements. At L'Aquila these are lacking in socio-economic resilience and planned according to criteria that are far too restrictive, especially regarding access to employment and services. Nor is there any indication that the longer term is being planned. Hence, if return to 'normality' involves reoccupation of the damaged urban fabrics, no one can tell when this will take place. The current strategy has apparently been designed under the assumption that it will not occur for decades.

In many places the occurrence of disaster opens a 'window of opportunity' for risk reduction. For example, in Iran the Manjil earthquake of 1990 and the Bam disaster of 2003 both led to step-like improvements in the country's disaster response.[18] It is striking that the L'Aquila earthquake did not lead to similar adjustments. Other parts of the country that have a similar earthquake risk, for example the Garfagnaga and Mugello in Tuscany, appear not to have benefited from a renewed interest in disaster reduction.

The L'Aquila earthquake can only be analysed satisfactorily in political terms (Figure 6), especially with regard to short-term voting behaviour resulting from government largesse and paternalism.[4] Governance and the mechanisms of social participation have been casualties of this emphasis. The main product has been a specious urbanisation, based on greenfield sites and as dependent on the private car as much of the American suburban sprawl of the mid-20th century. As current thinking is that disaster risk reduction must be integrated with sustainable resource usage (and it must be sustainable in its own right), the policies employed in Abruzzo may be regarded as storing up problems for the future, rather than solving them.

Figure 6. The political process of resettlement in L'Aquila.

Vulnerability is at the root of disaster risk. Most attempts to characterise it have concentrated on measuring it in a sectoral manner, for example in the social, economic, physical and cultural spheres. In a model I formulated some years ago[12,19], I identified six components, which can be evaluated with respect to the case of L'Aquila:-

Total vulnerability - life is generally precarious. This is not the case, as it applies mainly to places where poverty is an absolute quantity.

Economic vulnerability - people lack adequate occupation. This was the case before the 2009 earthquake and is doubly so in the aftermath when economic stagnation has set in and jobs have been lost en masse.

Technological/technocratic vulnerability - caused by the riskiness of technology. There is little sign that technology is an important source of vulnerability in L'Aquila.

Residual vulnerability - caused by lack of modernisation. This is a fundamental source of risk in the L'Aquila area, where lack of seismic retrofitting and lack of social participation and preparation are endemic.

Delinquent vulnerability - caused by corruption, negligence, etc. There is significant evidence, although none with scientific validity, that the L'Aquila earthquake was an opportunity for corruption and speculation. Although this aspect is by its very nature hard to evaluate, it seems that, rather than creating the conditions for improvement of safety, disaster in Italy opens a Pandora's box of negative outcomes by creating conditions that organised crime and corrupt people can exploit. At the same time, disaster tends to weaken structures designed to control speculation and crime, especially as the imperatives to get things done lead to the abbreviation of the relevant procedures.

Newly generated vulnerability - caused by changes in circumstances. As noted above, although the transitional settlement policy may have abated seismic risk, it may end up increasing social risk by creating fragmentation and isolation in the social fabric.

A change in attitudes and culture is urgently needed in order to reverse the trends described herein. The concept of resilience has succeeded in being accepted in places where it seemed far more foreign than it does in L'Aquila. A more locally based, socially inclusive policy of recovery would help it to be accepted there as well.

Acknowledgement

In the preparation of this article I gratefully acknowledge the help of the MICRODIS-L'Aquila research team: Caterina Antinori, Francesco Barbano, Anna Carbonelli, Vincenza Cofini, Christian Iasio, Michele Magni, Fausto Marincioni and Roberto Miniati.

References

[1] OECD 2010. Italy 2010: Review of the Italian National Civil Protection System (OECD Reviews of Risk Management Policies. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris, 173 pp.

[2] Alexander, D.E. 2010. The L'Aquila earthquake of 6 April 2009 and Italian Government policy on disaster response. Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research 2(4): 325-342.

[3] Gerhardt, R.T., J.S. McGhee, C. Cloonan, J.A. Pfaff and R.A. De Lorenzo 2001. U.S. Army MEDEVAC in the new millennium: a medical perspective. Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine 2(7): 659-664.

[4] Alexander, D.E. 2011. Civil protection amid disasters and scandals. In E. Pasotti and E. Gualmini (eds) Politica in Italia 2011 (Bologna), Italian Politics 2011 (San Francisco).

[5] Becker, N. 2009. Raising preparedness by risk analysis of post-disaster homelessness and improvement of emergency shelters. Disaster Prevention and Management 18(1): 49-54.

[6] Alexander, D.E., 1984. Housing crisis after natural disaster: the aftermath of the November 1980 southern Italian earthquake. Geoforum 15(4): 489-516.

[7] El-Anwar, O., K. El-Rayes and A. Elnashai 2010. Minimization of socioeconomic disruption for displaced populations following disasters. Disasters 34(3): 865-883.

[8] Haas, J.E., R.W. Kates and M.J. Bowden (eds) 1977. Reconstruction Following Disaster. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 331 pp.

[9] Stucchi, M., C. Meletti, G. Manfredi, M. Dolce (eds) 2009. L'Aquila, April 6th 2009, 3:32am. Progettazione Sismica 03: 1-256.

[10] Calvi, G.M. and V. Spaziante 2009. Reconstruction between temporary and definitive: the CASE project. Progettazione Sismica 03: 221-250

[11] Button, G.V.2006. Voices from the Astrodome and beyond: counternarrative accounts of disaster. Learning from Catastrophe: Quick Response Research in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina. Special Publication no. 40, Natural Hazards Centre, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado: 429-442.

[12] Özerdem, A. and T. Jacoby 2006. Disaster Management and Civil Society: Earthquake Relief in Japan, Turkey and India. International Library of Postwar Reconstruction and Development no. 1.I.B. Tauris, London 142 pp.

[13] Cosgrave, J. and M. Herson 2008. Perceptions of crisis and response: a synthesis of evaluations of the response to the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. ALNAP Seventh Review of Humanitarian Action. Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action, Overseas Development Institute, London, Chapter 4, p. 208.

[14] UNISDR 2005. Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities. United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, Geneva, 22 pp.

[15] Birkmann, J. (ed.) 2006. Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards: Towards Disaster Resilient Societies. United Nations University Press, Tokyo, 524 pp.

[16] e.g. Fallahi, A. 2007. Lessons learned from the housing reconstruction following the Bam earthquake in Iran. Australian Journal of Emergency Management 22(1): 26-35.

[17] Davis, I. 1978. Shelter After Disaster. Oxford Polytechnic Press, Oxford, 127 pp.

[18] Amini Hosseini, K., M. Kazem Jafari, M. Hosseini, B. Mansouri and S. Hosseinioon 2009. Development of urban planning guidelines for improving emergency response capacities in seismic areas of Iran. Disasters 33(4): 645-664.

[19] Alexander, D.E. 1997. The study of natural disasters, 1977-97: some reflections on a changing field of knowledge. Disasters 21(4): 284-305.

Disasters in the New Baroque Age

"Tell me, my man, what is the quickest way to Dublin?" "Well, to begin with, Sorr, I wouldn't start from here!"

As I write this, it is exactly 30 years to the hour since I was made homeless by the earthquake of 23 November 1980 in southern Italy. It prompts me to reflect on the role of history in our understanding of disasters.
In an old Hollywood costume drama film, a serf rushes into the king's chamber shouting "Your Majesty! Your Majesty! The Hundred Years' War has started!" That sense of crushing inevitability mixed with historical fallacy often pervades the study of disasters. In this ahistorical age we need to look back as well as forward. History does not repeat itself, but those people who ignore its lessons condemn themselves to relive at least some of its outcomes.
I argue that we live in the new Baroque age (Alexander 2000). The old Baroque age stretched, if you adopt a liberal definition, approximately from 1630 to 1750. It was a time of immense upheaval and change, a time of portentous disaster and of environmental transformation (Maravall 1979). It was characterised by a serious imbalance of wealth. At the same time it was a period of awakening, enlightenment and intense reactions to the social and intellectual strictures of organised religion. There was, nonetheless, conflict among the prevailing schools of thought about how to interpret the world. The intellectual ferment was fed by a tension of opposites, of which wealth versus crushing poverty was the greatest. This was stimulated by the sense of paradox brought by discovery and re-evaluation, on which the whole movement thrived. Symbolism had a paramount role in these processes. Yet the Baroque was not merely an artistic movement: it had distinctive economic, political and strategic characteristics, and distinctive disasters--floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, plagues and famines. It was a period in which economic assets were gambled with, a fact that might remind us of the banking crisis of 2009, just as the other characteristics of the period should remind us of many aspects of life in the early 21st century.
As the industrial revolution prepared the ground for the late 20th century technological revolution, so the conquest of the New World paved the way, by supplying the wealth, for the paradoxes and excesses of the Baroque period.
The Baroque period ended in war and strife. It degenerated into subjugation and dictatorship, so soon to be manifest in bloody and destructive battles. Intellectually, it led to the resurgence of bigotry and pessimism. The parallels between the Baroque period and the present day are striking (Alexander 2002). From 1630 to 1750 was a period in which human populations struggled to come to terms with new technological and socio-economic realities, much like the present time.
Readers will have to forgive my Eurocentric interpretation, but it is justified by historians (e.g. Jones 2003).
We need to learn how to look back. The wrong way is to look back to the last disaster, instead of anticipating the next one, and that is sadly very common. The right way is to study history, including the history of attitudes and responses to disaster, in order to learn its lessons. This requires sophisticated interpretation. Unfortunately, we live in a world that instantly forgets its lessons: witness the huge loss in personal resilience in Western countries since 1945. The fate of the British expeditionary force in Afghanistan in 1840, and of the Soviet Army more recently, ought to have imparted a lesson regarding military involvement in that country in the 2000s.
The way to put the past behind us is not to ignore it, for sooner or later it will come back to haunt us. The preeminence of symbolism in the baroque period has extensive parallels in this modern age of symbolic mass communication. The return of bigotry and social restriction (now called fundamentalism), intensified by demographic pressures, has parallels in both periods.
The Baroque period ended badly. Its demise was marked by the cataclysm of the Lisbon earthquake, fire and tsunami of 1755. Its consequences were strife and bloodshed. The response was extremely pessimistic. There is still time to learn from such events and avoid the worst outcomes for the modern world. Pessimism is not yet necessary.

References

Alexander, D.E. 2000. Confronting Catastrophe: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters. Terra Publishing, Harpenden, U.K., and Oxford University Press, New York, 282 pp.

Alexander, D.E. 2002. Nature's impartiality, man's inhumanity: reflections on terrorism and world crisis in a context of historical disaster. Disasters 26(1): 1-9.

Jones, E.L. 2003. The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (3rd edition). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Maravall, J.A. 1979. La cultura de la crisis barocca. Historia 16: 80-90.

Italian Civil Protection Amid Privatisation and Scandals

In 2004 the Israeli sociologist Avi Kirschenbaum published an interesting and authoritative book on disasters entitled Chaos, Organization, and Disaster Management.(1) The core of this volume presents the results of a well-conceived academic study of disaster preparedness in Kirschenbaum's home country: in this it is laudable but unremarkable. In contrast, the beginning and end of the book are both startlingly heretical. The first chapter draws attention to the huge increase in disasters in the last half of the twentieth century and suggests that it can be explained by corresponding increases in the number, size and importance of disaster management agencies, as these have sought to aggrandise the problem. Kirschenbaum's prescription is given in his last chapter: to privatise disaster management and make it a subscription service offered only to those who pay for it in advance.
Avi Kirschenbaum's book ought to be required reading for policy makers who deal with civil protection, but what would they make of it? It should be a sort of cod liver oil for disaster managers--foul tasting but good for them. In other words, rather than inducing the reader to advocate the privatisation of civil protection, it should stimulate him or her to marshal the arguments against such a move, and they are as numerous as they are powerful.
Suddenly, Kirschenbaum's book is highly relevant to Italy. On 30 December 2009, the Italian government emitted a decree-law (DL-195) to regulate the clear-up of toxic waste in Campania, a very necessary act, given the enormous damage to environment and health caused by years of mafia-controlled dumping in that region. Almost unnoticed in this legislative instrument, Article 16 turned the national civil protection organisation into a private company, with the Prime Minister as the only shareholder. For weeks before and after the publication of this law, politicians and the public devoted remarkably little attention to it. Employees affected by it demonstrated, and no one took any notice. Trade unions fulminated against it on their web pages, and no one noticed. Suddenly, more than six weeks after the publication of the decree, it all fell apart. The government retracted article 16 amid a welter of criticism and adverse publicity in the country's mass media.
By 2009, as a result of piecemeal legislation that left grey areas and superimposition of competencies and responsibilities, the need to do something about the Italian civil protection system had become acute, as was amply demonstrated during the aftermath of the L'Aquila earthquake of 6 April 2009. However, as noted above, the arguments against privatisation as a solution are powerful, for example:-
• the reaction to disasters needs to be a collective responsibility of society
• privatisation sits very badly with the selfless ethic of voluntarism
• it is open to abuse by commercial interests and organised crime
• it would be unethical for a government-sponsored company to make profits out of disaster relief.
General Luigi Manfredi, Vice-President of the Rome-based think-tank ISPRO, conducted a penetrating analysis and published it on the Institute's website.(2) Among his arguments were the following:-
• Article 16 of DL-195 is vaguely worded regarding responsibilities and the provenance of funds for disaster relief and recovery.
• It represents a form of privatisation of the civil service, but without the safeguards for personnel inherent in public employment.
• The relationship between the national Department of Civil Protection (an appendage of the cabinet of ministers) and the new company is unclear, and hence the latter's loyalties could be divided.
• The decree could lead to assumption of power without adequate democratic controls, or at least to the complication of a chain of command that in reality needs to be simplified.
And then, equally suddenly and without warning, the government retracted Article 16 of the decree-law.
In point of fact, this is not the first time that something of the sort has happened in Italy. To begin with, modern civil protection had a difficult birth, as from 1982 until 1991 political polarisation inhibited the creation of a viable system. The left wing feared, not entirely without reason, that measures adopted to combat natural disasters could lead to abuses of power and, in the last resort, to a potential coup d'etat. Hence, for many years the status of the country's disaster management organisation varied: a department of the Ministry of the Interior, a Ministry in its own right under a Minister without portfolio... And in 1999 measures were enacted to make it an autonomous agency, perhaps modelled on the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, but potentially even more independent of central government control. For three months in early 2000 the agency actually existed, and then it succumbed. Meanwhile, much responsibility for civil protection had gone to the regions as part of the devolution of Italy, fruit of the Bassanini law of 1998. Clearly, successive Italian governments have been torn between the desire to conserve power at the centre and that to offload responsibility to lower levels of government, and also between the desire to have a civil protection organisation under prime ministerial control or one that has full autonomy of action. The result is a mess which has done much to diminish public confidence in how the state performs in times of disaster. Rather than leaving citizens contented and feeling protected, they have acquired a dog's dinner of conflicting strategies, policies and legislation. As they say, "è stata una cosa all'italiana"--done in the Italian style.
Civil protection, or emergency preparedness, is as susceptible to corruption and scandal as any other field of public activity. In the USA the early years of FEMA were marked by accusations against its leaders, who were periodically driven into resignation. A detailed political analysis of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (after August 2005) painted a desperate picture of croneyism and incompetence in FEMA and its post-9/11 parent organisation, the US Department of Homeland Security.(3)
In Italy, many will remember the scandal that broke in August 1999 over the alleged misappropriation of funds and relief goods destined for the mission to Albania in favour of refugees displaced by the Kosovo war. Despite the flimsiness and inaccuracy of the allegations, several key officials were forced out of office, including the Undersecretary of State for Civil Protection. Conspiracy theorists, who abound in Italy, would regard this as a political means of effecting regime change in the civil protection hierarchy. It worked.
Currently, as I write, things are in a state of flux. Accusations are flying about corruption in the apportionment of contracts for the post-seismic reconstruction of L'Aquila. Once again, the accusations seem to be little more than business as it is normally conducted in Italy. The aftermath of the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, which affected 637 municipalities, led to corruption on such a scale that it has been suggested that only 25 per cent of the vast sums of money allocated to reconstruction actually reached the beneficiaries' This is remarkable for how little scandal it generated, not how much.
My fear is that we are in the middle of another attempt at regime change in the civil protection hierarchy. Currently, there is little sign of innovation or improvement in the system, which badly needs to be clarified, simplified and brought up to date. This is unlikely to happen amid a welter of legislation and counter-legislation.

Notes

(1) Kirschenbaum, A. 2004. Chaos, Organization, and Disaster Management. Marcel Dekker, New York, 328 pp.
(2) Manfredi, Gen. Luigi 2010. Una nuova società di stato. ISPRO, Istituto di Studio della Protezione Civile, Roma, www.ispro.it (accessed 20 February 2010).
(3) Cooper, C., R.J. Block and R. Block 2006. Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security. Times Books, New York, 333 pp.

Reflections on the Haiti earthquake of 12 January 2010

As I write, a major earthquake has once again caused devastation in yet another country afflicted by poverty and destitution. Haiti is a country of ten million inhabitants, the poorest in the western hemisphere, ranked 149 out of 182 in UNDP's Human Development Index, with a per capita GDP of $610, a life expectancy at birth of 61 years and an adult literacy rate of 62 per cent. The statistics are too arid to say much about the suffering. Moreover, Haiti has frequent floods and occasional hurricanes, such as Jeanne in 2004. It had no major earthquake between 1770 and 2010, but that is typical of seismic 'gaps' at the tectonic plate margins, areas where strain builds up to the point of a mighty rupture.

The 12 January 2010 earthquake was powerful (M=7.1), shallow in its focus (initial point of rupture in the earth's crust) and with an epicentre only 16 km from Port au Prince, a metropolitan area that contains one fifth of the national population. As I write, three days after the earthquake, there is no indication of the magnitude of the death toll. It will probably never be known in detail, such are the problems of record-keeping in places like Haiti.

Whereas major disasters may absorb something like 0.2 per cent of the resources of a rich country, the proportion may be orders of magnitude larger in poor nations. Both Haiti and Nicaragua have had their economic development set back by decades as a result of the devastation caused by natural disasters, including the loss of employment and infrastructure, and the unsustainable burden of recovery. In fact, with the addition of political and military instability, and corruption, some parts of Managua have never been reconstructed after the 1972 earthquake.

On the positive side, the occurrence of a major natural catastrophe--a politically neutral phenomenon--is a good opportunity to reinforce processes of reconciliation and governance-building by international "disaster diplomacy". On the other hand, the international community has not shown much interest in investing heavily in disaster prevention, even after major events have graphically demonstrated the needs. For example, when eight Caribbean and Central American nations were affected by Hurricane Mitch in 1998 the rich countries organized an aid package that cost less than three per cent of what they were spending rescuing hedge fund investors--i.e. unsuccessful financial market gamblers--on Wall Street. One can only hope that the new emphasis on disaster risk reduction in the arrangements for managing climate change at the world level will have some positive fallout for earthquake damage prevention.

Vulnerability to disaster is an innate property of people and things that is difficult to measure. By analogy, like friction it is mobilised by events: hence, it materialises as impact when hazards become disasters. Suddenly, the seismic vulnerability of Haiti is revealed in the aftermath of a catastrophic disaster that has caused wholesale destruction on a scale that is seen relatively rarely (Tehran, Istanbul, Kathmandu and Tokyo are among the few places that could end up surpassing it). In Port au Prince many of the main strategic buildings have collapsed, including the National Palace, the Pétionville Hospital and the UN MINUSTAH headquarters. The shanty towns of the poor are devastated in a manner that is seldom seen in more substantial, more permanent forms of vernacular housing. Loss of life has been devastating, not merely among ordinary citizens, but also among key foreign and domestic personnel. One can only hope that the international community will mainstream disaster risk reduction and help Haiti to rebuild an infrastructure in which the key elements resist impacts sufficiently to enable the rest to be saved in future disasters.

Up to 90 per cent of the deaths that occur in earthquakes fall in the world's poorest countries and regions. The only reason that these areas do not account for the largest proportion of the costs of damage is the poverty of their assets: hence, sums of money are no measure of the degree of suffering. Poverty and disaster vulnerability are not quite synonyms. For example, some of the poorer villages of Nepal have become quite organized to defend themselves against floods and landslides. Human ingenuity has enabled at least some poor communities to better their circumstances and create their own resilience. Good governance is the key to progress. Regardless of the financial constraints, a sense of participatory self-determination is always beneficial to disaster risk reduction. Civil society, public administration and businesses need to work together under the precepts of the Hyogo Framework for Action, 2005-2015, the United Nations' blueprint for disaster reduction. The example of Afghanistan (another of the world's most seismically hazardous countries) is seminal. Lack of security, stability and governance has effectively prevented the creation of civil protection structures and the only in-place alternative is mere improvisation.

The international community is sensitive to the issue of major natural disasters. Moreover, with climate change, sea-level rise and the intensification of meteorological phenomena, it is clear that disasters will be larger and more devastating in the future unless resilience is boosted. However, although there has been much discussion of the need to switch from reacting to disasters after they have occurred to instituting prior prevention measures, this has hardly begun to happen. Thus the earthquake of 2001 in El Salvador was in many ways a repeat of the 1986 Salvadorian earthquake, including in some of the relief measures.

Restricting the discussion to the most immediate forms of assistance, the convergence of up to 2000 foreign search-and-rescue specialists from all parts of the globe, necessary as it may be under the circumstances, is simply not an efficient way of saving the lives of people trapped and injured by earthquakes. Few rescuers arrive before 36 hours have gone by and average survival times under rubble are usually well under 24 hours, perhaps below 12 hours, depending on local conditions. The cost per life saved of foreign rescue, medical and field hospital resources is extremely high relative to what could be achieved if capacity were available locally. As we know very well where the world's biggest natural disasters are likely to occur, it is time that a concerted international effort were made to encourage local preparedness. If it cannot begin with prevention, then at least let us build up the capacity to react locally. This means transfer of technology, equipment, expertise and training to where they are likely to be needed, plus efforts to ensure that readiness is permanently maintained. This is sustainable disaster preparedness: it needs willpower, organization, tenacity, generosity and undivided attention. Unless those qualities are forthcoming from the international community, the next major disaster will bring forth the same dreary story, in which predictable miseries are described as if they were unexpected and unfathomable.

Disasters: the Symbolist Manifesto

Figure 1. Meaning and acceptance of disaster in historical context.

Figure 2. Metemorphosis of culture in the context of interpreting disaster.

Modernism and post-modernism

Since 1920 an impressive body of disaster research has built up in the social sciences. Cultural ecology and social adaptation to risk have been studied in great depth (Oliver-Smith 1998); so have social relations in disaster (Perry and Quarantelli 2005) and perception of hazards (Johnson and Covello 1987). However, the body of theory may be large and authoritative, but much of it relates to a world that has been swept away by the march of history. The heyday of theory production in hazard and disaster research extended from the mid-1960s to the 1970s (Barton 1970, White 1974). In this period the canons of human ecology and social relations in disaster were established (Burton et al. 1978). Since then, the world has moved on and many dearly-held tenets of research have been called into question by the relentless tide of information and communications technology, globalisation, promotion of ideology, and environmental imperatives. It is time to update theory to reflect the new realities of the 21st century world.

There have, of course, been attempts to tackle this problem. Mark Pelling (2003) called for theory that can help us understand and interpret globalisation. Some years earlier Ulrich Beck published his theory of the risk society (Beck 1992) and, as it is considered to be the principal post-modern theory of risk, it has been debated ever since. However, I argue that we do not live in a risk society: we live in a vulnerability society. There is a fundamental difference between the two perspectives: the former looks at society as technocracy from above, the latter from below, from the point of view of the vulnerable, the inveterate risk takers not the people who exercise choice.

Technology can lead us to a new post-modern interpretation of risk and disaster concerned with the ways in which it propagates meaning. Modern life involves vast new challenges in the search for meaning, huge perturbations in the human condition. Symbolism is a form of iconography or semiotics. It involves meaning as reduced to symbols, or concentrated and encapsulated in them (Jung 1964).

In recent decades the volume, flux and scope of the information that is available to people have all increased beyond any reasonable means of measurement. Unless technological collapse were to occur--which does not currently appear probable--the increase is set to continue. The pace of change is exemplified by the geometric progression in the calculating and memory power of integrated microcircuits ("Moore's law"--after Moore 1965). Humanity cannot adapt fast enough to the consequences of such changes. Full-scale adaptation would require the wholesale abandonment of cultures and large accretions of beliefs. It would require people spontaneously to free themselves from credos and superstitions, which has never yet occurred in human history.

Instead, inherited beliefs can condition people's view of disaster. At the root of this, natural calamity was once seen in a very narrow view symbolic manner based on judgement, retribution and portents (Figure 1). This constitutes one common aspect of the inherited cultural background that fuses with modern etic (i.e. universal) cultures in the process of cultural metamorphosis that is so important to the ways in which risk and disaster are perceived (Figure 2).

One of the most striking changes of the early 21st century is the realisation that problems can be solved by the instantaneous application of concepts and techniques developed very far away, through information and communications technology. This is the concept of real time. In the 1960s the geographer William Bunge (1966) started a conceptual revolution in his discipline by showing that spatial relationships were no longer literal and defined by distance in a geopolitical world in which the war front could be anywhere that an intercontinental ballistic missile could reach. The nuclear threat has relaxed, or perhaps merely changed, but Bunge's geographical topology has since become vastly more complex and significant. It is now relatively easy to involve oneself in the affairs of distant places and to make instantaneous connections.

In a highly networked world we cannot make sense of vast fluxes of information without symbolism. The pressure to interpret information has become so intense that we are creating a cartoon world of stylised relationships. It is highly amenable to symbolic interpretation, which is constantly facilitated by the accelerating pace of life.

Nonetheless, older views of disaster survive unscathed and thus coexist with the new (Figure 2). In the modern world vast populations survive with no piped water or electricity supplies. Yet even in such cases technological change has not been completely absent. Mobile telephony and internet access, for example, have penetrated some highly unlikely places. Cultural metamorphosis with a technological basis may be proceeding at different speeds in different places, but it is inevitable. It paves the way for new forms of symbolism. Perhaps it will turn out that the greatest luminary of disaster studies in the 20th century was the psychologist Karl Jung (1964).

The value of a symbolic interpretation

The first benefit is, of course, a greater understanding of people's perception of and relationships with disaster. No orders can be issued and effectively acted upon, no laws will successfully protect society, without taking into account people's perceptions, because these are what govern their predilections, choices and actions.

In the first place, symbolism equates with money. People will spend their wealth on things that have high symbolic value. The positive aspects of this involve donation, acquisition and economic support. In a negative manner there can be disequilibrium in investments and expenditures and support for inefficient forms of risk aversion (Peterson 2002). Governments will spend money because voters demand action, and that too can be related to symbolic interpretations. For example, accidents in the transportation field have had significant impacts on expenditure to reduce risks and increase safely, in some cases quite independently of the technical and economic arguments for investment but merely because public perception demands that particular ghosts be laid (Perrow 1984).

Secondly, symbolism encapsulates the essence of meaning. In the 21st century world old certainties have been swept away. Let us not underestimate the importance of the search for meaning in countless human lives that are caught in the resulting melee. One of the weakest, yet most pervasive forms of symbolism is numericism, love of numbers, or quantification of all things. Targets, statistics and quantities are a constant accompaniment to modern life. Sometimes they are vital or at least valuable, sometimes they are misleading or fraudulent. Amid the spread of rationalism--sometimes specious rationalism--measurements are the tools of influence, and sometimes the facilitators of modern conflict. In the worst case quantification is a damaging form of obfuscation (Alexander 2000). In the best case it can offer overwhelmingly convincing arguments for action and change. Through its reductive nature it is, however, one of the forms of symbolism.

Thirdly, over the last 60 years celebrity has become the life blood of mass media communication. Its power should not be underestimated. Celebrity has become a substitute for local curiosity. For many people it represents the idealised projection of their own personae, or at least the object of their fascination. In the modern world celebrity is increasingly powerful. In the most extreme cases it amounts to a pseudo-democratic form of unelected leadership. In many instances elected representatives are seen as less able, and less responsive, than entertainment celebrities, who have gradually increased their position as foci of change. Celebrity is intimately linked with popular and political views of disaster (Bronfen 2001). Moreover, celebrity is redolent with symbolism, much of it heavily manufactured by the entertainment industry and cultural organisations through astute use of the mass media.

Thus, symbolism can embody people's hopes, aspirations, fears and phobias, and a significant portion of their beliefs.

How can we use the symbolic interpretation in favour of disaster risk reduction?

First of all, it should be treated as a factor to reckon with. Media mean money. So do opinions, beliefs, communications and all the paraphernalia by which symbolism is propagated. Decoding symbolism is the key to how people react to risk and disaster--as risk takers, victims, donors, decision-makers, and so on. That process is the key to interpretation for policy, planning and action in disaster risk reduction and emergency response.

Symbolism could be used positively. Disaster risk is becoming increasing salient. In commercial culture branding and marketing have become so pervasive and spread so far that symbolism is the essence of commercial activity. Unwittingly, people have become accustomed to it. It has become second nature and the power of brands is overwhelming. In the same manner symbolism can be used to produce and promote a culture of risk reduction.

Conclusions

Symbolism is potentially the key to a new post-modern understanding of the social impact of disasters. This could be achieved by interpreting the role of symbolism in conditioning the pervasive new means of mass communication. Much work needs to be done to codify and amplify such interpretations and to consolidate the model. However, as profound changes in the technological underpinnings of modern life have occurred, the pace of cultural metamorphosis has accelerated. It is therefore imperative that new theory be made to help us understand the social, cultural and economic impacts of disaster in the 21st century.

References

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Barton, A.H. 1970. Communities in Disaster: A Sociological Analysis of Collective Stress Situations. Doubleday, New York.

Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans M. Ritter. Sage, London, 260 pp.

Bronfen, E. 2001. Fault lines: catastrophe and celebrity culture. European Studies 16: 117-139.

Bunge, W.W. 1966. Theoretical Geography. Lund Studies in Geography. Gleerup, Lund.

Burton, I., Kates, R.W. and White, G.F. 1978. The Environment as Hazard. Oxford University Press, New York; 2nd edition: 1993, Guilford Press, New York.

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Jung, C.G. and associates 1964. Man and His Symbols. Doubleday, Garden City, New York.

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Perrow, C. 1984. Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies. Basic Books, New York.

Perry, R.W. and E.L. Quarantelli (eds) 2005. What is a Disaster? New Answers to Old Questions. Xlibris Press, Philadelphia, 375 pp.

Peterson, M. 2002. The limits of catastrophe aversion. Risk Analysis 22(3): 527-538.

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