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Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management Crisis and Emergency Management Newsletter Website |
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December
2006
Volume
11 - Number 3 |
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“…. Dear doctor, in the history of human kind there aren’t voluntary regressions” The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil May 6th 1976 nine o’clock in the evening our babysitter had just sent us to bed. My sister and I were still awake in our bedrooms when the house started to shake and the plaster began to fall over our beds and on our heads. It became all dark. The lights in the house went off along with the public illumination on the streets. The house kept shaking for a never ending 55 seconds. Aurora, the baby sitter, was yelling at us to go down stairs. We met her at half flight. She dragged us downstairs and into the street. Only at that point we started to hear our father running down the street and yelling “kids, kids”. The silence after the earthquake was somehow unreal. There was only dad’s voice and his footsteps on the stone paving. Mum arrived a few minutes later. She made sure that we were all right and she bravely ventured inside our house, an old tower overlooking the river. She managed to call her father in Rome to tell him that we were all safe just before the phone lines went dead. She grabbed a couple of blankets and came out. What to do now? My parents decided to go to Torreano, a little village in the countryside, hometown of one of my grandmothers, to camp in the back garden of our nanny. In less than half an hour we arrived there. Armida, the nanny, Geromino her husband and Gemma the neighbor were outside the intact stone farmhouse. They welcomed us in the dim light of a flashlight in the dark of the night. Sara and I fell asleep in the car while the adults where still outside starting a fire and talking about what to do the following day. The day after, a mythical season started for Sara and I. It was a time of discoveries: the whole countryside was our playground. We explored every corner of the hills around Torreano. We were somehow sent back in time. We saw cows giving birth. We fed chickens and ducks. We learned how to kill and skin a rabbit. We spent the evenings listening, with the other kids of the village, to the elders’ stories while picking linden and chamomile flowers from branches where they had been put to dry. We all played on the streets at the same time, completely unattended, and followed by the caring eyes of the people around us. All the social conventions were gone. There was no time for formality. The future was uncertain but full of hope. I will never forget that feeling of community and strength that that terrible time gave to all the people. This is my account of that beautiful summer. The Friuli Earthquake took place at 21:06 pm of May 1976. The epicenter was under mount San Simeone, between the towns of Osoppo and Gemona del Friuli. The intensity was 6.4 on the Richter scale, 10 degrees Mercalli scale. The earthquake was felt in all of Northern Italy and Slovenia. It invested mainly 77 villages and small towns with a population of approximately 60.000 inhabitants. 965 people died and over 45,000 people were left without shelter (my family among them). It took 10 years for complete recovery. The Friuli province went from being one of the poorest in north of Italy to having one of the most flourishing industrial economies in the country. All the houses and villages where rebuilt “where they were, and how they were (with state of the art concealed anti-seismic skeletons)” but the traditions and rural life was gone. The small villages on the hills, with their new “old houses,” died when the young generations moved to the plains to become part of the new economical miracle. Gabriele Pascolini |