Aftershock: a crater diary.

Day one. Unstable ground.

It happens when you get off a boat or a plane after a long trip, putting your feet on the mainland after a while: you have that strange feeling of suspension, of unstable ground following you for a few hours.
The same feeling, boosted, you can experience it right after a seismic event.

Not for hours, but for whole days — in some cases for weeks or months — our brain keeps on being alert, instantly triggering our attention for any movement or vibration, albeit almost imperceptible, of what is in contact with our body: floor, chair, any point of support. Usually, we are not so overloaded with sensations, on the contrary: in general we consciously perceive only a minimal part of the bulk of information that comes through our senses from what surrounds us, and we go as if on autopilot for everything else. After you’ve been struck in the middle of an earthquake it’s no longer like that.

It’s not something pleasant or simply bizarre, like when you land after a trip. It’s terribly compelling. After the earthquake, we find ourselves at the mercy of a sophisticated and ancestral defence mechanism of our deepest sustenance system, which pumps adrenaline to allow us to run to safety as soon as possible from imminent danger. A proper post-traumatic stress disorder that is continually reactivated in the event of new, albeit minor, shocks. A nuisance that is a further out of tune detail, a background noise superimposed on the whirlwind of thoughts that flow in your head in the hours, days, and months following the complete reorganization of your life and that of an entire community.

Yesterday, the last Sunday in October 2016 at 7.40 a.m., a violent earthquake shaken the lives of thousands of people around the central Apennines, after weeks of relentless seismic events that have put a vast area that has always been out of the spotlight to the most severe test. Other significant aftershock events (as we have learned at our own expense is called the seismic swarm) still continue to rage, further worsening a situation now unsustainable.

Being inside a building at that moment, to helplessly observe a familiar space brutally subjected to abnormal stress that deforms and shakes it with sounds and creaks never heard before, and to witness the terrified glances of those around us: well, this is the exact opposite of a pleasant sensation.

In addition to buildings, or entire cities, the earthquake physically and psychologically wreaks havoc on our lives.
It makes us feel violated, as well as our spaces, literally at the mercy of events. We skilful programmers of our agendas and our existences, in a few tens of seconds we find ourselves in the middle of the street. In a panic, dressed as the earthquake found us, and with so many fewer certainties than just a few dozen seconds earlier.
All around, the sad litany of alarms near and far, and the cries of fear.

In the age of disintermediation, many people feel compelled to hot comments, to analyse what happened in an apparently lucid and argued way, even though they have nothing to offer except questionable sources and their own partial and far from objective judgement criteria — perhaps clouded by an ill-concealed state of panic. And while the coolest ones try to obtain certain information and data from the network — for which physiologically, despite our understandable urgency to know and understand, it takes a few minutes/hours of decanting and verification before being disclosed — among the compulsive outsourcers the usual or new idiots are sprouting up to fire off conjectures or conclusions without construct.

Despite everything, when there is only vagueness at hand, it is all too easy to settle for it, so effortlessly available on social network streams: sure, it’s better than nothing, but still.
That’s why I thought it would be useful, in the face of the orgy of inaccuracies spread by the media in recent days, to queue up some reflections from inside the earthquake crater, possibly based on demonstrable facts. One possible way to try to process this disaster.

Day two. Earthquake for dummies.

Fatality. Destiny. The underground, insidious monster.
Although sometimes we may tell ourselves this way, in seeing so much human and material capital inevitably compromised and unsustainable suffering generated by seemingly inexplicable reasons, we should convince ourselves of this, once and for all:
The earthquake is not a monster. Read and repeat.
In Italy (as in Japan, or in Chile, or near the Himalayas), earthquake is anything but an anomaly.

Italy is a unique country, also from a geographical point of view: a long and narrow strip of land surrounded on three sides by the sea, with the Apennines and the Alps formed through orogenesis precisely by the movement of opposing tectonic masses, in progress for millions of years. These translations do not take place on tracks, they do not run smooth as silk: in the contact and contrast between immense layers of rock material in reciprocal movement, tensions and friction are progressively created along the faults which, once released, create seismic events. It’s not as fascinating as the narration of hypogeal monsters awakening, but that’s how it works.

A large part of the Italian territory is the result of these actions, and the Apennine belt, in particular, is still being transformed, centimetre after centimetre every year, by these same actions. For this reason, few regions in Italy can truly consider themselves safe from seismic events, which are nothing more than natural processes through which the landscapes we love and where we grew up or still live are generated over millions of years of progressive microshifts and fractures.
We humans, at a scale of continental dimensions and geological eras, represent negligible details, small sentient parasites that persist in surviving on the outer crust of a complex dynamic system. A system that we have only guessed for a few decades, and only up to a certain point.

In a perfect world, earthquakes in these areas should not in themselves be a drama: they represented the praxis for millennia.
Instead, it is a drama — today that we have tools to remember and analyze what happened in the past and to draw lessons from it — the wrong way we still too often insist on erecting new buildings and adapting historical ones.

In Italy, which boasts the most advanced studies on this subject and which developed the most exquisite theories and practices of anti-seismic construction techniques, it is a real drama the generalist ignorance of the ways in which existing or badly restored buildings work, and the lack of understanding of their respective (and predictable) damage mechanisms when stressed to their limits. It is a drama of irresponsibility the way in which so many interventions are carried out in historical and monumental buildings — which often host public functions and are therefore subject to being filled with unaware people — so that we are happy with cosmetic embellishments and superficial restorations instead of refining the most suitable methods of intervention. These methods, however, have been experimented for centuries in buildings (or, unfortunately, in parts of buildings) that have resisted the most terrible events by behaving very well through remarkable earthquakes.
So the responsibility for the earthquake deaths somehow lies with us. But who’s us?

Not us in the self-absolutory sense of generic man, or the multinationals or the Bildeberg group to cause earthquakes, perhaps with drilling – those carried out in Italy act on the complex processes of orogenesis such as acupuncture on a rhinoceros. I am referring to us citizens, and us technicians commissioned by the citizens, us politician in charge, elected by the citizens, because in an area historically considered to be at risk from earthquakes there are those who still don’t build or restore or maintain buildings with criterion and in safety, and we all do not claim to be guaranteed with adequate standards that every single fucking property owner will do so, indiscriminately.

Because a building with earthquake-resistant specs may be damaged, but allows people inside to escape unharmed in a reasonable time after a shock. Whereas dying from an earthquake in 2016 is no longer acceptable.
It is as if at the end of a detective story we discovered that the culprit was in front of our eyes right from the first chapter. If we are curious, that’s when we start reading the book all over again to understand its mechanisms.

Day three. Living (and not dying) on the fault line.

What’s worse than an earthquake? There is a sequence of several earthquakes generated by different nearby faults that activate each other, which hit buildings within a few weeks, and that does not allow to repair the vulnerabilities that are created between shocks. Vulnerabilities that are irreparable in the hectic times of the emergency, and that favour, in case of further earthquakes, the serious damage or the collapse even of buildings that had anti-seismic characteristics.

The mayors of the municipalities of Norcia and Visso, after the first shocks of August 2016 — which did not result in any deaths in the areas of Marche and Umbria a few dozen kilometers from the epicenter, already proven by a former big earthquake in 1997 — stressed that the good practices of reconstruction had actually worked. But on the morning of October 30, with clouds of lime still hovering ominously over the latest collapses in those cities in particular, someone began to point out that the mayors had proclaimed themselves virtuous too soon, and therefore they should have taken a bath in humility: there are no excellencies, after all, and we are all equal.
All guilty, and therefore no one guilty.

I think it’s an unfounded judgment, as well as short-sighted.

First of all, let us remember that in 1980 another massive earthquake — identical to that of Sunday 30 October 2016 (magnitude 6.5 Richter) that devastated Norcia and Visso and caused damage all still to be verified in 195 municipalities between the Adriatic and Rome — in Irpinia caused almost 3000 deaths. While this earthquake caused, net of so much suffering and discomfort, a total of 299 deaths in the entire crater area, concentrated in the part closest to Amatrice and Arquata del Tronto.
And not to mention that the first seismic events of August 2016 took place in the most disadvantageous tourist crowding scenario of the year for this area, so that in Amatrice alone there were more than 5000 tourists, residents and owners of second homes.

Good practices of reconstruction are working.
And good reconstruction — and especially the seismic improvement of the existing buildings — as widespread, normal and standardized practices are a testable advantage, the furthest from rhetoric: an anti-seismic building can be damaged, but allows you to get out and save yourself in a reasonable time without getting hurt, or worse. And in Umbria and Marche regions over 30,000 people, although forced to leave their homes for safety reasons, are doing so on their own legs. Those same buildings that somehow sheltered their occupants during the first quakes collapsed at some point afterwards, progressively worn out by the three violent shocks of October. But there is no doubt that they had already done their duty very well, unlike elsewhere in Italy – unfortunately.

Because there is so much to learn from mistakes, but if mistakes are human lives lost it is more appropriate to learn from good examples.

Day four. Back home.

In addition to the human tragedy that affects an entire community, the other tragedy caused by seismic events is the state of damage to existing buildings, the vast majority of which are residences.
The earthquake crater has been characterized for millennia by a constellation of villages and small towns, rebuilt several times over the rubble of the previous ones after remarkable seismic events occurred and documented over the centuries — evidence of the ordinariness of earthquake in these places. The medieval buildings that have survived to the present day have particularly sturdy masonry masses, as well as some military-grade construction features that, if not degenerated from restoration work carried out in later periods, have guaranteed their longevity through remarkable structural resilience.

But these specimens represent the exception: minor historical buildings are often replacements, mostly built on previous well-proven foundations —perhaps just after medium and severe earthquakes, so that footings and lower portions were probably the only intact part of a former construction — and with recycled bricks and materials bound by poor mortars. It is not uncommon to observe buildings that were developed in successive phases, with extensions and elevations carried out, especially in times far from earthquakes, with extreme nonchalance.

It’s common for historic buildings to show vulnerabilities in geometry and position/amplitude of the wall openings (doors, windows, discontinuity of the façade and floor) in a masonry structure, and specific weaknesses due to the poor presence of retention systems and adequate connections between the load-bearing elements. But also the use of recycled material from previous collapses can be listed among the reasons for the poor structural performance at the first chance of an earthquake: while the best stones and ashlars remain in position in the (parts of) specimens still standing, the unsquared stones and small-sized ashlars that were opportunistically or for economic reasons found among the rubble, even if arranged in masonry by skilled workers (and for minor construction is not guaranteed) represent a very bad legacy within a building rebuilt in the past on the ashes of others: because in a load-bearing wall, as in other structural typologies, the weak link is able of putting the whole system into crisis.

But the worst would come later: the post-war constructions, not only houses but also farms and productive buildings, bear witness to the uncritical acceptance of new construction technologies available at the time, with the widespread use of frames made of bad concrete (poorly designed and badly reinforced, often worn out by frost and weathering as well as by negligence) and infills of single or double thickness perforated bricks, certainly not known for their characteristics of thermal insulation or structural stability. During an earthquake these infills, if not perfectly retained and if damaged, tend to collapse easily towards the inside or outside of the building, causing further damage.

These ways of dealing with the new have also managed to do serious and permanent damage to historic buildings. Masonry constructions with wooden floors and roofs had for centuries been the most sustainable, sensible and structurally coherent way to create buildings in these long-lived areas, structures easily repairable by anyone. But the restorations of the 1950-90s, instead of simply repairing past collapses, maintenance debts and related vulnerabilities that make a masonry building unstable and unarmed in the face of tensile stress caused by earthquakes, introduced rigid reinforced concrete kerbs, badly armed plasters (which always go into a crisis of detachment due to peak load) and in recent times the inhomogeneous and poorly distributed injections into the wall sacks. All wrong methods that soon became the general practice, often capable of causing increased vulnerability.

Moreover, reinforced concrete is a very delicate material in cold climates such as the Apennines: and if these systems were most likely applied by professionals expert in monumental constructions (although the collapse of the vaults of the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi in 1997 is not an excellent example of credibility in this sense), in minor buildings the panacea of concrete was managed by anyone, often without the necessary skill and technological expertise.

The 1997 earthquake in these same areas had opened our eyes to the limits (and damage) of the approaches and interventions of the previous decades, making us directly understand the functioning of many damage mechanisms of historical buildings and, above all, the practical reasons why some examples had passed those tests with great ease: very simple good practices, derived from the solid local building tradition, tested in the field according to typological and constructive evolutions resulting from centuries-old selection through endless series of telluric movements, errors and reconstructions.
In this scenario, the earthquake tends to represent a perfect test of strength for constructions, a test to all intents and purposes that highlights their merits and, unfortunately, their defects.

The thousands of shots taken from August 24 to the present day in the earthquake-ravaged centres could be the subject of years of architectural and forensic engineering studies: those concrete kerbs and roofs that fell intact on the rubble – evidence of restoration and bad seismic adaptations – after having crumbled with their extreme rigidity the ductile, often centuries-old stone and brick walls, are the plastic declaration of failure of decades of irresponsible structural practices, which applied the abstract concepts then in vogue for new constructions to minor historical buildings.

From all this we can draw — unfortunately once again, hopefully the last one here in Italy — a great lesson: buildings can be more or less solved, functional, evocative, even beautiful spaces. But buildings can become real weapons of destruction if they are not designed and built to perfection. So it is necessary that they are all designed and manufactured or restored in a state-of-the-art manner, by law. Private, public, places of worship.
Because our lives and the lives of our loved ones are at stake. And because otherwise, if we start planning exclusions from priorities, it can happen that my building, perfectly and responsibly realized, during an earthquake is damaged or destroyed by an adjacent building structurally incorrect.

This is the way to be condemned to a routine state of emergency. Which, if you will, is even more paradoxical.

Day five. Monumentum, monimentum.

And the monumental heritage? It is the other great theme of this earthquake. After trying to save as many human lives as possible and give a house back to those who have lost it, the other (equally serious, albeit secondary) issue on which to act immediately is precisely that of intervention on monumental assets.
Exceptional buildings in terms of size, construction technology, historical interest, structural daring, location in the built or natural surrounding landscape, often also because of their content of works of art: a noble material that must be protected and safeguarded — if possible before preventable disasters — since, like the economic activities of the territory, it represents its identity as well as one of the main attractions together with the unique landscape.

It has been said that what we are experiencing is not the first earthquake of this scale to shake the central Apennines, and probably it will not be the last: with such magnitude, historical texts report at least one previous event of 1328, and another of 1703, also mentioned in a plaque inside the splendid Renaissance Sanctuary of Macereto (Visso):

This sanctuary with a central octagonal plan, built between 1528 and 1556 under the direction of Giovan Battista da Lugano on the basis of a previous project by Bramante (also from the Marche region), was the subject of impressive restoration work financed by Pope Clement XII immediately after a further earthquake in 1730, and of a refined carbon reinforcement of the extrados of the dome after 1997. The work was so effective that it was able to withstand these last shocks of 2016 practically unscathed.

It’s not a miracle, but excellent construction techniques applied in a magnificent building.
We then return to the tenet of good practice: techniques of building (and of intervening on the built heritage) that more or less consciously originate in these areas in ancient times.
In fact, let’s not forget that we are in the former Papal State, and that in these territories the greatest designers and builders of all times worked, sent from Rome: the international state of the art, at least for the most representative buildings, which drew theoretical and practical sap as well as in a multi-millennial array of exemplary buildings, often signed by the most prestigious starchitects in the history of architecture, also in the treatises of Rondelet and Durand, and through these, gradually back in the Renaissance to Vitruvius and the origins of the hereditary axis of Roman buildings. A technical and practical open-air encyclopaedia, made up of remarkable examples with more or less direct reverberations in minor buildings.

But not all the monuments of this territory have had the same good fortune — or rather: the same technical attention in the past — as the Sanctuary of Macereto: we have witnessed, with the most intense shocks, the collapse or serious damage of many bell towers (the most fragile for shape and slimness if subjected to intense horizontal stress, especially if not provided with appropriate tie-rods) and churches of inestimable historical, architectural as well as symbolic value.

There can be many reasons. In spite of good intentions, sometimes it is not possible to 100%-earthquake-proof secure a monument for sadly trivial and practical reasons: insufficient budget, concrete impossibility to update it to the current legislation without distorting it, fundamentalist positions taken by the protection bodies, hidden structural naivety, avoidable technical errors, diagnosis and repair of the damage of past earthquakes not carried out in a workmanlike manner, designers, officials and controllers not up to their role … I could go on. And prove every time that it is not, unfortunately, the bad fate.

As we discussed in more detail on the occasion of our State of Exception at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014, the historic Italian architecture that we are investigating and rightly protecting today originally represented an advanced point in the technique of its time, and later it was the result of endless contaminations, replacements, juxtapositions and manipulations, progressive or sudden, which in a complex evolutionary path have produced exceptional results of great richness, allowing many remarkable buildings to stay alive through the centuries: often with small adjustments and improvements against the challenge of time and events, sometimes even rebirthing on their own ruins, or being radically transformed.

While today a fatalistic and all-Italian complex of inferiority prevents us from intervening on this heritage as we should and as we always have done (and as we would do very well, since archaeologists and restorers trained in Italy are in great demand in the most complex construction sites abroad): the freezing of the past as a commodity to be exploited for tourist purposes and a certain romantic Manichaeism that characterizes some (not all, but almost all) institutions responsible for the protection of the historical-artistic heritage of this Country have caused the paradoxical difficulty of preserving this same past alive in an effective way, and it is the main issue on which to reflect seriously when we talk about securing – and alas rebuilding – the monuments that deserved to be protected with facts, not only with decrees. Making them alive and open to the future, as they always have been.

What is clear today is that an earthquake of this magnitude was (and probably will be) only a matter of time, and today it is necessary to radically rethink our relationship with the historical-artistic heritage we have in dowry, and the most effective ways to preserve and transmit it safely. It would be opportune to rediscover us once again, as well as out of the already mentioned routine emergency, responsible programmers of our future as citizens of the “most beautiful country in the world”: a rather fragile status, which deserves the maximum operative care.
It would be appropriate. But it will not be easy.

Day six. Ok. Now what?

We’re used to earthquakes around here. I personally, at 44 years of age, have lived through at least 5 remarkable ones in my life, the last one this year. But this time it was different.

Only those who have been in this part of Apennines in person, in the towns and villages disfigured by the series of earthquakes of August-October 2016, have been able to grasp the gravity of what happened in a few moments.

A war scenario: roads literally exploded, immense landslides blocking vital arteries since Roman times. In the villages, ruins on piled up rubble, Civil Protection and firemen at the uninterrupted garrison of urban landscapes now abandoned.

And tens of thousands of people displaced towards the coast or the great Apennine lakes, places considered safer, hundreds of kilometres away from what was their home, their world. A world made up of partly or completely emptied towns and buildings, views of bedrooms and living rooms that were once intimate now exposed to the wind and frost. A world where many people from the coast come back daily, or several times a week: to work in companies that insist on running their business as before; or to provide assistance to the few family members who are unwilling or unable to move. The result is a tragic uprooting, hopefully as temporary as possible, of a piece of Italy.

Also for this reason too many people, although safe and sound, in those same places or far away, today seem dead walking. Because of the residual shock that continues to haunt their thoughts and their sleep. For having lost so much, too much, in a few moments.

Most of the buildings erected above the faults that were reactivated in 2016 enabled the occupants to escape unscathed, a sign that the seismic improvement and adaptation measures favoured by the regulatory practices following the 1997 earthquake (in particular Law no. 61 of 30 March 1998 and the relevant codes of practice) had positive, verifiable effects on the existing building stock. But as mentioned above, the buildings themselves, subjected to an exhausting series of successive phenomena, have progressively suffered further damage and therefore new specific vulnerabilities, impossible to repair promptly, with the result of permanent damage and collapse during the most intense tremors of 27 and 30 October 2016.

In any case, a war bulletin could be drawn up in the areas at the fault line. There was a building fabric consolidated in almost three centuries of absence of devastating earthquakes, today largely lost or seriously compromised. But also there were, like invasive particulates, a swarm of mediocre buildings built between the 50s and early 90s, which have given the worst of themselves during earthquakes and of which few of us will sincerely be nostalgic — if not as fragments of private sentimental value. And there was a constellation of monuments, also irreparably damaged or disfigured in a grotesque way, with some exceptions.

Assuming that a decorous and clear solution will be found for the thousands of evacuees, any operation that will be carried out on the stock of buildings will have to look to the worthy exceptions of the past: to the specimens that have proudly stood in past earthquakes, for practical and verifiable reasons, which must be a shared example from which can be drawn a coordinated system of intervention in the future. And to the good practices of reconstruction in 1997, as fundamental for the safety of so many lives, as well as the object of an incomprehensible damnatio memoriae (perhaps because clickbait rhetoric and narrative was still preferred to pragmatic facts, and everything went perfectly as planned by the Prodi government then in charge).

Good practices that in the light of recent events need to be further deepened and enhanced, so as to make public and private spaces even safer and more resilient, even if subjected to successive and repeated shocks, with limited damage and easily restored, carefully avoiding weak structural links and chain collapses.

For the most representative buildings seriously compromised or collapsed, complex operational considerations must be activated on the appropriateness of reconstruction, on the material and/or symbolic respect of authenticity, on the recognizability and reversibility of the interventions, on the compatibility of structural improvements of the construction, on the conservation of the raw matter. A separate in-depth investigation should be carried out, involving intellectuals and philosophers of international calibre, on the subject of the copy and the prudent management of its usefulness in exceptional cases such as this. Also inquiring the conditions and intellectual courage to think of alternative or more experimental hypotheses.

For minor historical heritage, the hope is that the level of intervention will not be equated to generalist building, taking this opportunity not only to rebuild, but even to improve the pre-existing situation, from both the urban and architectural points of view, respecting the references and the memory of what has been lost, restoring and enhancing what was and will be the nature of these unique places.

And, precisely for this reason, we should have the guts of not rebuilding everything, but instead commit ourselves to develop new criteria for selection and evolution. Hopefully eliminating already incongruous elements, and adding — or inserting in substitution, where possible and appropriate — new stem cells of meaning, able to express the present and the future in a dynamic and positive relationship with what we have inherited (or with a curated and cultured selection of it).

I sincerely hope that the technical-scientific committees that will be activated soon will be able, programmatically, not to be self-referential and closed, but open and visionary, involving different disciplinary sectors and international intellectual contributions for the reconstruction of a territory that can be considered, and not from today, universal heritage.

I’ve said it before, we’re used to earthquakes around here.

But this time the wounds are so deep that it will take years, or decades, to heal them. As with large trees that have crashed in the storm, many branches have fallen — the dry ones more easily than the others — and permanent scars will remain as evidence.

If we look back, Italy — and not only this territory — has already faced cataclysms like that of the last few weeks. In the past, new branches have been reborn on these occasions, and today they are the backbone of our culture and our collective memory. It took some time, and we found ourselves more advanced, more beautiful than before.

Well, every damn time we found the way and the strength to look ahead. And as for cities and monuments, we have always built and rebuilt them several times, in our whole history.
Today it seems impossible, but we will continue to do so. Hopefully much better.

Luca Silenzi, novembre 2016

This text, written in a flash after the seismic tremors in Central Italy in October 2016, is published in six parts on Medium, in Italian language.