The Overloaded Ark

I had some spare time after I had finished work in Siracusa and so I decided to visit the Archaeological Museum. The historical centre of the city is one of the closest approximations to "a rose-red city, half as old as time". The archaeological remains of Magna Graecia appear suffused with the Mediterranean sun, especially the faces of the terracotta maidens, perpetually fresh and young.

The Museum was full of teenage girls in dark blue suits. Apparently, they had some custodial role, but what it was could only be guessed: a dozen of them patrolled the museum's corridors and I was the only visitor, hopelessly outnumbered. Made up like juvenile filmstars, very much in the Southern manner, they simpered at me and followed ma around with their eyes, wistfully. Romantic notions of a rich foreigner ready to bear the lucky winner away to a new life of luxury and experience--definitely not me!

Industry and commerce are at a low ebb, unemployment is rife, and so public institutions are stuffed with employees until they appear like an overloaded ark. Nowadays, the fashion is for temporary contracts and starvation wages--the precariato. The teenage employees of the museum were too young and inexperienced to have realised the irony of their situation, but that cannot be said for their older counterparts who have weathered the temporary contracts and achieved the miracle of being taken on as 'proper' employees, not mere "collaborators". Perpetual job security and unattractive salaries have left many of them with a "world-owes-me-a-living" mentality and a marked reluctance to change anything for the better, even human relations, or perhaps especially that. These are the people who turn their backs and pretend to be busy as soon as you walk into their office. A book that purported to explain Italian culture to foreigners stated that in every office in Italy there are six people. Five of them do absolutely nothing and the sixth does the work of all of them combined and is referred to by his compatriots as "il fanatico".

If there is not enough to do--and how could there be with so much overstaffing?--then shear boredom dictates that some form of work must be invented: self-justifying work, that creates its own raison d'etre. Recently, I did a day's teaching. A modest sum will be paid to me after a majority of my earnings have been taken away in tax and social security deductions. When preparation and travel time are included, the remuneration is far from generous. To obtain it, I had to fill in eight forms. On these, I stated my date and place of birth four times. I signed eight times. I wrote my address four times and I gave my taxpayer identification number four times. I wrote my bank details three times on one form alone. I filled in an extra form on a government web site, and, strictly following instructions, I repeated my bank account details three times on the same form. Given my qualifications, in terms of labour costs the whole exercise was worth something more than a third of my net earnings. I also had to purchase and affix an administrative stamp--the cherry on top of the bureaucratic cake.

A Tuscan who went to work in the USA once said to me, I think with some justification, that "in American one works well and lives badly; in Italy one lives well and works badly". A Swiss pathologist whom I met at a conference opined that Italy is the country where genius is closest to madness. "In Italy under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed--they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce...? The cuckoo clock." Orson Welles was wrong about the cuckoo clock, a German invention, but what sort of Renaissance would modern Italian bureaucracy produce?

Now it can be told

A quarter of a century has passed and at last the story can be told. As it is still "politically radioactive", and its half-life has definitely not passed, I have changed the names of the people, places and organisations. It is as well to do so, as some heavy accusations are involved. Naturally, the following account is absolute fantasy--of course it is! What else could it be?
In December 1982 several hundred hectares of land slid into the sea on the northern fringes of a city with a population of more than 100,000 inhabitants. It was Europe's largest urban landslide, and it left two people dead and thousands homeless. Almost 300 buildings were left completely unserviceable, including two large hospitals and a significant part of the local university. The main arterial road and railway lines were pushed into the sea.

I arrived in January 1983 and spent the next five years studying the landslide and its many physical, political and social ramifications.

The national scientific research council instituted a research programme with the objectives of finding out the exact causes of the landslide. It was co-ordinated by Don Giuliano, Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Terravecchia. In the South of the country civil engineering is one of the few professions to be constantly lucrative. To be a full professor of the subject is to be in an undeniable position of power with respect to the contracts for the planning, design and management of large projects. In fact, Don G. had cornered the market in this field. No professional geotechnical engineer or applied geologist in the southeast could work without Don G's tacit or explicit permission. There was an unwritten agreement that the bosses at the University of Terranova would have absolute control over the projects in the west. Terravecchia would control the east, and contracts relating to places in between would be shared between the two fiefdoms. At his own university, Don G. had his minions write his scientific articles for him. This was a no-risk strategy, as the authors were far too in awe of his power to confess publically. In fact, the only drawback was the occasionally at conferences a foreign academic would ask Don G. what he had meant in one of his articles and he couldn't remember having published it, or perhaps he had not even read it. In any event, an international society awarded him a gold medal in recognition of his "extraordinary scientific productivity". Indeed!

For Don G. and his followers, it was a major coup to be able to shift activities to a lucrative area further north, an achievement that had much to do with Don G's alliance with the Rector of the University of Miramare, who would later move down the coast to preside over a seat of higher learning closer to Terravecchia (where he would eventually be indicted for nepotism).

Given the scale of the emergency in Miramare, the national government invested significantly in the scientific effort to study the causes and mechanisms of the landslide. Although the sums were paltry by the standards of many Western countries, earth sciences in Italy had been starved of funds to the extent that the Miramare landslide project was a sudden, unexpected windfall that stimulated many researchers' appetites for funded work.

Of course, to preserve the existing power structures, the available funds had to be divided up between all parties, and universities, that exerted some influence in the area. The result was a free-for-all that led to a very heterogeneous scientific effort. When large landslides occur it is opportune to study the subsoil by sinking a number of borings. At Miramare more than 110 were drilled, but in a completely haphazard pattern that contributed very little to the general picture of the causes and mechanisms of the movement. One painful consequence of this was that when a meeting was held in the Great Hall of the University of Miramare's Rectorate to present the results of the scientific enquiry to the public, the researchers had no answers to the practical questions posed by the association of people made homeless by the landslide, such as could the damaged buildings be rehabilitated? and was it safe to rebuild in the area?

The Miramare landslide had been a political question for more than two centuries. It had inherited a heavy political baggage in terms of the decision to expand the city northwards into an area that had suffered major landsliding in the 1770s and 1920 (although not to the extent of the later disaster). From the morning after the 1982 landslide functionaries and politicians scrambled energetically to avoid the political responsibility or deflect it onto their colleagues, and any attempt to understand the aftermath has to take account of this tendency.

One of the aspects of the scientific enquiry that is most difficult to understand is its sheer amateurish irrationality. Nevertheless, if the framework of analysis is changed, it suddenly springs into focus and becomes eminently explainable. Let us see how and why.

Although the landslide was perforated like a sieve with boreholes, only one of them, located right in the middle, penetrated deeper than a few tens of metres. At 240 metres below the surface there appeared to be a hiatus in the continuity of the sediments that were being drilled through. It was taken to indicate the presence of a plane of movement that had caused the entire landslide to rotate in a deep axis with a perfect curvilinear movement. Justification for this model was taken from a case in Alaska, which, however, was much smaller, had occurred in very different sediments, and was caused directly by a major earthquake (the Miramare landslide may have had some long-term connection with earth tremors, as the area is seismically active, but no quakes occurred in December 1982 and the landslide was undoubtably caused by prolonged rainfall). The rotational movement hypothesis quickly assumed the status of orthodoxy and it made a rapid transition to "established fact" (Don G. vigorously promoted it), even though in mechanical terms it was ridiculously unsuited to the case at Miramare and there was plenty of evidence to support a flatter, shallower movement that was more a sort of conveyor belt than a rotating bowl.

For many years it was not clear to me why such an unsuitable model had been adhered to so enthusiastically. Indeed, a dozen years after the landslide, one of Don G's senior collaborators took me aside in the coffee room during a national conference and confidentially pulled some borehole logs out of his pocket: one seemed to point to the rotational model but the other 19 roundly disproved it.

Not that it was easy to acquire information. Don G. and his team did not want an independent expert buzzing around their investigations. This was made very clear to me when in 1986 I was invited to an international conference in Don G's home town and systematically prevented from speaking at it. In truth, I had prepared an utterly innocuous 12-minute talk on something quite unconnected with Miramare, but the organisers decided to be prudent: who knows what I might have revealed ad libitum?

For two field seasons I was the guest of the Mayor and City Council of Miramare. They provided accommodation while I conducted my research and in return I was asked to write confidential reports containing my evaluation of the developing situation regarding the landslide. Clearly the Mayor did not regard any local or national authority as sufficiently independent to give him an unbiased assessment taken from an impartial viewpoint. As Professor at a large American university I was the only foreigner to make my presence felt in scientific circles at Miramare at that time.

Eventually, a large geotechnical engineering report on the landslide was compiled. With all the tests, simulations and compendia of data, it filled a series of boxes that reached a metre and a half above the floor. I found it extremely disappointing. The data had been collected in such an unsystematic manner that it proved impossible to evaluate alternative models of the landslide mechanism beyond a few minor variations. The report struck me as shallow and inconclusive, but at the time it did not cross my mind that this might be a deliberate strategy. The report concluded that a substantial infill of rock and sediment on the downslope, seaward side of the movement would stabilise it and permit redevelopment of the slope. This struck me as ridiculous in mechanical terms, but I was unaware of the motives that led to such a conclusion.

My reports to the Mayor of Miramare were written with great care and attention. I stuck rigorously to general principles and observations, said nothing specific about any existing document or ongoing study and made sure that I separated the facts from my own opinions. In short I tried to keep out of the political minefield. While this strategy avoided any direct criticism of other people's work--which would have been dangerous under the circumstances--the sheer vagueness of my observations made them amenable to a wide variety of possible interpretations amid the political currents of the time.

One day in December 1988 the regional newspapers all carried the headline "U.S. expert throws out landslide plan". My reports had been stolen from a locked desk in the regional government headquarters and leaked to the press. There was an immediate political firestorm. It hinged on the question of whether it was a good idea to spend $40 million on the projected infill at the base of the landslide. Whether or not this would have done any good, the stated justification for it (i.e. stabilising the movement) was patently wrong. The regional government abandoned the plan and was forced to convene a high-level commission of enquiry. I later found that its first task was to enquire into me and my motives, but as I had received no payments from anyone in Italy there was nothing I could be indicted for. The commission ratified the decision to abandon the infill project.

Two decades later I found out that Don G. had planned the infill as a means of disposing of the waste from gypsum quarrying in his home region. Two groups of people would have enriched themselves on the basis of a gigantic and wasteful engineering project that would probably have caused more problems than it would have solved, and would have created some extremely dubious environmental modifications. The people of Miramare got out of that, although they had other concrete-steel-and-earth-moving projects of debatable utility foisted upon them. The geological fraternity in Italy closed ranks against me and I thus failed to get a chair at an Italian university. And Don G. suffered one of the very few setbacks that have interrupted his long and brilliant career.

In any account such as this the writer will add a measure of self justification. Judge for yourself, gentle reader, how close to reality this story is. I repeat that it is pure fantasy--of course!