The first
technical step of the system, which was defined in the field, was to conduct a
damage assessment. At that time, the network of Municipalities lacked the
expertise required to deal with an emergency of exceptional size and severity.
In their
analysis published by the Journal of the Order of Engineers in 2016, Giorgio
Dri and Roberto Gentilli, two professionals who experienced the situation
first-hand, highlight that damage surveying, carried out as a matter of
urgency, constituted the first significant moment in which the worlds of
politics and technical professionals were required to confront one another and
find shared solutions. According to Dri and Gentilli, «for the politicians, the
fundamental necessity was to act quickly (“from tents to houses”), granting the
maximum level of recognition to mayors and, above all, to property owners. The
belief was that, having experienced the situation first-hand, the property
owners were better able to assess (and possibly direct) public interventions.
For technicians, the priority was to avoid major mistakes and achieve a
reasonable degree of uniformity in damage assessments, which were carried out
in difficult logistical, psychological and personal safety conditions, as well
as under the pressure of public opinion, which wanted technical inspections (a
prerequisite for receiving the allocated contributions) to be completed in a
very short timeframe».
After the
initial stages of rescue and securing damaged buildings, the first objective
was to assess the damage in preparation for repairs, also in light of the
provisions of the first regional law on the subject, Regional Law 15 dated May
10 1976, which granted «capital contributions of up to 90 per cent of the cost
of repairing and rebuilding, including replacement, of private homes that were
destroyed or seriously damaged».
A few days
later, the Regional Council unanimously approved a subsequent provision,
Regional Law n. 17 dated June 17 (Emergency
measures to meet the extraordinary and urgent housing needs of the populations
affected by the earthquakes of May 1976 in Friuli Venezia Giulia). The
minutes of the session indicate that the law was passed to provide «rapid and
effective assistance to the population affected by the disastrous earthquake,
which left them homeless and forced to live in tent cities. The aim was to streamline
bureaucracy: a spending limit of 6 million lire was set for each «small»
dwelling to be repaired, without excluding the possibility of undertaking
structural work.
The lawmakers
aimed to restrict interventions to repairs only and, for the time being, to
exclude structural work. This was primarily to avoid falling under the
provisions set out in anti-seismic legislation, which would impose additional
obligations. The goal was to facilitate a quick transition from living in tents
to returning people to homes that had been repaired.
In addition to
the issue of urgency, the drafting of the legislation forced a number of
decisions on the government, the most important of which was whether public or
private intervention was preferable. Next, it was necessary to decide whether
to organise 'grouped' contracts, which included grouping several works
together, or to favour the individual initiatives of single parties. The
technicians and politicians held different views on these points. The
technicians were in favour of unifying interventions into broader operations
based on a concrete assessment of the operational capacities of companies and
citizens. The politicians, however, feared that this approach might limit the
action of the affected citizens and the strategic choices of local administrations.
Although the two modes of intervention were considered equivalent in the draft
versions of the law, public intervention was limited to the “option” of mayors
entering into agreements with companies in the final text. This made the
execution of works less challenging and more straightforward, but the option
was only used to a limited extent.
In order to
assess the damage, the amount of aid to be provided and the most suitable type
of repair in each Municipality, one or more groups of technicians surveyed the
condition of buildings that were not irreversibly damaged. To carry out this
assessment using a uniform and reliable criterion, Marcello Conti, an engineer
from Udine, drew up a Damage Assessment
Report Form on which the surveyors recorded a “summary assessment” of the
condition of the building, which could be classified as ‘destroyed’,’irreparable’
or’ repairable’. In the latter case, the compiler had to indicate whether the
restoration would be total or partial and whether structural work would be
necessary.
In order to
assess the cost-effectiveness of the restoration, the form had to include the
value of the building on May 5 and the estimated cost of the repair work,
calculated as the sum of the “basic unit costs” for the main construction
elements. This cumbersome method of calculating repair costs avoided any design
considerations on the part of the surveyors: only general information useful
for quantifying the work was provided, without an in-depth structural
examination, which was expected to take place at a later date, in any case,
before the restoration.
In the lively
debate within the Regional Council, it was nevertheless decided that the survey
teams would also have to determine the necessary repair works and that a sheet
containing the General indications on the
technical methods of the restoration intervention should be added to the
inspection report. In some cases, these indications proved to be the cause of
misunderstandings and protests on the part of those who, among the recipients
of the contributions, had expected an executable structural design.
Each survey
team consisted of three technicians, public officials or experts registered
with the rolls of the regional professional orders and colleges, supported by
colleagues coming from all over Italy. Over the course of four months, 390
teams were organised and deployed, which completed more than 85,000 inspection
forms.
Each building
required technical assessments from a constructional and structural, economic,
and also a human perspective. The composition of the three-person teams had to
take account of the rotation of technicians in order to ensure that each group
included experienced professionals alongside younger ones. Forty per cent of
the members of the teams were surveyors, followed by engineers and architects,
and ten per cent were technicians. The damage survey operation began rapidly:
by the end of June, less than two months after the shocks, almost 200 teams had
already been set up. Despite the criticism that this operation inevitably
generated, their work made it possible to collect a significant number of
estimates in a relatively short time and with a considerable degree of
uniformity of judgement. Between May and September, the technicians estimated
damage amounting to almost 250 billion lire. Interrupted by the new seismic
emergency, which required a change of pace, the data collection would be
completed in the first half of 1977. The data were used by lecturers from the
two regional universities – Giovanni Battista Carulli and Dario Slejko in
Trieste, and Marcello Riuscetti in Udine – for studies on vulnerability and
seismic risk assessment.
In one of his
memoirs, the extraordinary secretary general for reconstruction, Emanuele
Chiavola, clarified the reasons behind this operation, which began in May 1976:
«It was thought that, based on the data collected from the forms, contributions
could be made for repairs, which would be carried out directly by the citizens
who were pushing for a quick return to their homes under the slogan: “We do not
want shacks”.»
However,
Chiavola had to admit that «the harsh reality of a very different situation
became apparent on September 15» when a new earthquake struck, damaging even
the houses that had already been repaired. Everyone was forced to admit that
the repair plan, which focused on superficial restoration of the walls without
any structural anti-seismic measures, was impossible to implement and would
inevitably fail. The psychological backlash was so violent that it even called
into question the principle of repair and reconstruction, ‘where it was and how
it was’. At that point, it became clear that seismic reinforcement of existing
buildings was not possible, nor convenient, and that it was preferable to
demolish the damaged buildings and rebuild them from the ground up, if
necessary, even choosing to move the building to a new location.
Once that
moment of discouragement and rethinking had passed, the idea of carrying out
anti-seismic repairs on damaged buildings was reconsidered: on June 30 1977, a
new specific regional act was presented to regulate repairs (Regional Law 30
dated June 20 1977), based on the fact that the repair of homes could not be
considered an urgent intervention, but rather a more deliberate and definitive
one. As the Regional Council stated during the discussion of the law,
reconstruction would represent «a fundamental element [...], the first
criterion of which must be to harmonise, in a balanced and rational framework,
new constructions with the recoverable part of the building heritage that has
been damaged».