Terror in the Tagliamento Valley

Tuning into Italian television's Channel 1 one night last week, viewers throughout Italy were treated to a bizarre sight. The time was 9 p.m., Europe's favorite TV hour; on the channel Economist Siro Lombardini was just settling down to discuss the nation's troubled economy. Suddenly chairs, set and people began to tremble. "// terremoto! II terremoto! [Earthquake! Earthquake!]" shouted a frightened cameraman. While thousands looked on in amazement, economist and TV crew made a live, unceremonious departure.

Most of the viewers by then had also begun to feel the tremors from Italy's worst earthquake since 1915. The epicenter was plotted in the Tagliamento River Valley, in the Dolomite foothills northeast of Venice, an Italian resort area and scene of bitter World War I battles. There 20 villages were badly battered by a light shock, followed by a major quake that lasted 55 seconds and measured a severe 6.9 on the Richter Scale; eleven more lesser tremors followed over a three-hour period. More than 700 people were killed under falling rubble before the shocks subsided.

Like ripples on a pond, the shock waves of Tagliamento quivered outward in a broad circle. In Venice, the campanile of St. Mark's trembled and the lagoon waters suddenly roiled. In Pisa, the Leaning Tower vibrated--but held its precarious tilt. On the Venice-Vienna railroad line, a train suddenly derailed as the tracks weaved out from under it. Shakes and masonry cracks were reported as far away as Frankfurt, Munich and the French town of Nancy.

Italian seismic experts had been expecting something to happen, but they had no way of telling precisely where, when or how badly. After the disaster, Professor Raffaele Bendandi of the Faenza Geophysical Laboratory reported that seven or eight days before "the ground in northeastern Italy rose by 7.75 in., according to our instruments. This was a sign that we could expect some sort of tremor." The area along the Tagliamento is earthquake country of a sort. At the Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory in Monteporzio, Scientist Mariacecilia Spadea had already measured 20 or 30 minor shocks there this year. But, she said, "there was no history of severe earthquakes there in this century. It would have been impossible to predict a catastrophe like this."

For the survivors of the quake, part of the terror was the unexpectedness of the tremors on a warm spring evening and the fact that they began in darkness. "We had just turned on the TV after dinner," said one resident of Buia (pop. 8,000). "At first I thought it was a truck passing. But then the roof caved in on my mother. She died instantly." In neighboring Maiano (pop. 6,200), hit hardest by the earthquake, a trattoria collapsed on 40 customers dining inside. With power gone and no lights to work by, rescuers could do little more than pull blindly at the wreckage and listen to the screams and moans of the buried survivors.

The battered villages did have the minor good fortune to lie in a military garrison zone, next to the Yugoslav border, where some 32,000 soldiers were quickly mustered for rescue duty. Shortly before 5 a.m., as first light began to break, Italian and U.S. helicopters joined forces to fly out the injured. At week's end, as strong new tremors hit the area, the rescuers were still hauling corpses out of the rubble and the death toll seemed certain to go much higher.

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