Every year Meteorological Department, no matter its England or India, Australia or Italy, gets a stick for being inconsistent with their weather predictions. This has developed a consistency over some time now and when the department says there won’t be any more rains in the city, trust me, it’s the best time to buy yourself a new raincoat because you’ll need it more than anything else in the coming days.
So, following the pattern of events in L’Aquila, Italy, the authorities of Meteorological Department too should be sentenced a term in jail. Sounds too harsh? But how will someone justify the highly astonishing and incredibly ridiculous judgment to six Italian scientists who now face six years in jail and massive fines just because they failed, just like our Meteorological department, to predict the unpredictable nature of the planet we live on.
The jailing of Italian seismologists after they failed to predict the likelihood of a major earthquake which was about to hit L’Aquila in April 2009 have been held responsible for the deaths of more than 300 people and 1000 injured people. This left the entire scientific community in shock and angry voices have been heard all over the world media. The event, however, raises an important question – Can anyone be held responsible in the event of a natural disaster and the loss of life and money related to it?
The answer is a big resounding ‘NO’. How can you hold someone responsible when there’s no foolproof method to predict ‘disasters’ (be it natural or man-made) especially predicting earthquakes. Over several decades scientists have tried to predict earthquakes but have achieved limited success. Based on the timing of previous tremors, one can just determine a window (which could be of several years to decades) during which an earthquake is more likely to occur on a particular fault. But one can certainly not say that an earthquake would take place in London on Sunday tea-time. How about reprimanding someone to fail to predict the trajectory of the growth of a tree and how long before it bores fruits?
The story of punishing the so-called ‘culprits’ for failing to predict a natural phenomenon stretches back to 20th century B.C. (according to a Chinese story, which many believe is a myth) where Hsi and Ho, court astronomers were executed after their failure to predict an eclipse of the sun.
Coming back to L’Aquila and it would have made more sense if attention was paid to limiting damage control rather than hunting for scapegoats. It would have made more sense if efforts and resources were concentrated towards reducing the degree of damage rather than risking the efforts put in by the breed of next generation scientists. Similarly, it would have made more sense if the officials would have dedicated committees to solve post-flood issues in Mumbai rather than digging into the files of environmentalists to track down who messed up the city planning duties.
Moreover, this just sends a negative message and no one would be persuaded to join the government knowing that in their pursuit of saving lives, they might just falter with their ‘timing’ a bit and end up behind the bars, bankrupt. Creating scapegoats will just be costing us more lives.