Why the Italy Quake Was So Severe

The rubble in Amatrice, Italy, on Wednesday. Amatrice, whose mayor lamented that
“half the town no longer exists,” has stone churches and other buildings that were
constructed centuries ago, when little if anything was known about
earthquakes.CreditGregorio Borgia/Associated Press

Image
The rubble in Amatrice, Italy, on Wednesday. Amatrice, whose mayor lamented that
“half the town no longer exists,” has stone churches and other buildings that were
constructed centuries ago, when little if anything was known about
earthquakes.CreditCreditGregorio Borgia/Associated Press

By Dan Bilefsky and Henry Fountain

 Aug. 24, 2016

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  The combination of a shallow fault and old, unreinforced masonry buildings led to
widespread devastation in the earthquake that struck central Italy early Wednesday.

The magnitude-6.2 quake killed at least 241 people and left hundreds more injured.
Many people were trapped in the rubble of collapsed buildings.

Like other villages and towns in the mountainous area, Amatrice, where the mayor
lamented that “half the town no longer exists,” has stone churches and other buildings
that were constructed centuries ago, when little if anything was known about
earthquakes. Unless they have been reinforced in recent years, such structures are easily
damaged or destroyed by shaking.

“Even 100 years ago, they didn’t know how to build structures to withstand
earthquakes,” said David A. Rothery, professor of planetary geosciences at the Open
University in Milton Keynes, England.

The earthquake was less powerful than many recent deadly quakes. The magnitude-7.8
earthquake that struck Nepal in April 2015, for instance, killing 8,000 people, released
roughly 250 times more energy.

Video
A 6.2-magnitude earthquake nearly 100 miles northeast of Rome has left hundreds dead
and many more injured. The mayor of one town, Amatrice, said at least half of his town
was destroyed.CreditCreditCrocchioni/European Pressphoto Agency

But the Italian quake was very shallow: According to the United States Geological
Survey, it occurred about six miles below the surface. “Shallow earthquakes cause more
destruction than deep earthquakes because the shallowness of the source makes the
ground-shaking at the surface worse,” Professor Rothery said.

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Video from Amatrice and other towns near the quake center showed heaps of masonry
rubble from buildings that had been shaken apart.

Earthquakes are set off by the movement of the earth’s crust, which is divided into large
sections called tectonic plates. The Apennine Mountains, where the quake occurred on
Wednesday, are in an area where one plate, the African, is moving under another, the
Eurasian.

Because of the complex interaction between the plates, the basin of the Tyrrhenian Sea,
off Italy’s west coast, is spreading. It is this spreading, and the tension it creates in the
Apennines, that led to the quake.

The area of Wednesday’s temblor experienced significant earthquakes in the past,

including one with a magnitude of 6.3 near the town of L’Aquila in 2009 that killed at
least 295 people, injured more than 1,000 and left 55,000 homeless.
The two quakes had much in common in terms of genesis and depth,” said Massimo
Cocco, a geologist with the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome.

Italian Towns Before and After the Earthquake

Towns in a mountainous stretch of central Italy were severely damaged by an
earthquake that killed hundreds of people and trapped scores under debris.

Aug. 24, 2016

After the 2009 quake, seven members of a national commission on risk prevention were
arrested on charges of failing to adequately warn L’Aquila about the earthquake risk.
They were found guilty of manslaughter in 2012 and sentenced to six years in prison,
but they were cleared in 2014 by an appeals court.

Mr. Cocco said that Italy had anti-seismic construction laws for new buildings, but that
little has been done to reinforce existing buildings.

“Resilience is just too low compared to the frequency and the high impact of natural
phenomena,” he said.

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

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A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 24, 2016, on Page A6 of the New York
edition with the headline: Why Damage in Italy Was So Severe. Order Reprints |
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