Wednesday 30 May 2012

Dawn in Northern Italy

Seventy further shocks around 3.5 Richter have shaken northern Italy all night long.  The repeated effects of these on the fabric of ancient buildings is profound.

The damage to the industrial base is in the billions of euros.

Here is a police video from one of their helicopters. 

2 comments:

Sen. C.R.O'Blene said...

Tragic loss of some beautiful buildings.

I'm not sure how long it takes for someone to forget what they used to look like, and moves on.

hatfield girl said...

The people are reduced to rubble too, Scrobs. They're so disoriented they are being treated in field hospitals and medics are being drafted in from across Italy. These aren't new towns or modern settlements; I don't think they can imagine their suroundings are destroyed for ever, from how they look on the nedia. Certainly they'll build again where they were but how do you put back a half a millennia old town? Even the Poles failed in rebuilding the centre of Warsaw.

Some centres are so dangerous they are surveying them with drones. In other places they are showing engineers with centuries' old drawings trying to work out what has happened to buildings with bits missing.

The engineers and surveyers guilds from various regions are supplying personnel gratis to assist private citizens on what can and can't be done with reconstructing their buildings.

The industrial plant is being cleared and put up on fresh sites under fresh regulation but the villages, towns and even the cities are an enormous jigsaw. I'm not sure I understand properly but a lot of the buildings are relying on one another and have all kinds of clever engineering going on that is disturbed.

Modena itself is a world heritage site- the finest expression of romanesque architecture.

It's not just the structure but all the ornamentation, the statues the carvings that are unstable in places that look ok-ish. A lady in Venice had a marble statue from a roof land right next to her the day before yesterday.

The entire north is checking building by building in every place. The university of Bologna re-opened yesterday but not any of the schools and the palazzo d'Accursio, the Bologna town hall, has had to be closed, as has the law library in the university of Pisa (part of the National Library) and a number of bridges in Venice - just to give an idea of the geographic scale of the damage.