Seismic Manslaughter?

Between their perceptibly constant inaccuracy and their dunderheaded, buoyant cheerfulness, most people carry a lit cherry bomb of rage-hate in their hearts for the local weathercaster.

The toothsome halfwit says it will hail with the wrath of a cantankerous Poseidon after six jugs of ambrosia; however, it is now dry as a bone and sunny, and I am stuck shouldering an umbrella decorated with teletubbies to a business meeting with my boss, whose inner child has long since withered and died.

Poseidon has a very fickle bladder.

Weather people, we’ve established, are aggravating. Often, we feel that wrong forecast should be punishable by a good thump to the kidneys. It would do justice to them all.

But, what of justice on a larger scale, for weather predictions a little more high-stakes than a miscalculated morning spritz?

Several Italian seismologists are currently being prosecuted for their failure to predict a 2009 earthquake that killed 300 people.

Considering that seismological technology is not near advanced enough to predict earthquakes with any reliability, the move seems draconian. No one is to blame for a natural disaster, and ill-preparedness is more of a bureaucratic malfunction than scientific one. Probably, the Italian government is just trying to shift blame anywhere but on itself.

Still, I wonder what it’s like to work and live in a career heaped with so much unprevented carnage...

In August of 1923, famed Japanese seismologist Fusakichi Omori left Japan for a conference in Melbourne, Australia. He had recently assured the citizens of Japan that the country was relatively safe from cataclysmic earthquakes for the foreseeable future.

Later that month, while Omori was still at his conference, an earthquake of unprecedented proportions flattened Yokohama and Tokyo into rubble. Yokohama was wiped off the planet, and 140,000 people were killed within two days.

Omori died, “in intense pain,” two months later, of a brain tumor, his illness presumably compounded by his guilt.

So, all I’m saying: it’s psychically burdensome work, trying to envisage weather catastrophes in advance. Surely, the judiciary system doesn’t need to make it more harrowing.

Of course, I’m still in favor of a punching-weathercasters-in-the-soft-tissue penal measure.

-Information about Omori was gleaned from Yokohama Burning by Joshua Hammer, a great historical account of that disaster, beautifully written. I read it days after the 2011 earthquake hit Japan. It gave me nightmares.