The Recovery Process in L'Aquila

On 1/17/20 we went to L’Aquila to see the damage caused by the April 2009 earthquake. Our first visit was to a church that nearly completely collapsed due to the earthquake. The dome of the church and two large pillars fell during the earthquake.The church was finally fully restored and open to the public in late 2017. 

Picture of restored organ and pillar in church

After the church we went to a construction site where we saw the present recovery efforts being carried out. We went inside two palaces that were damaged, and a few contractors and an architect explained the recovery process to us. Inside one of the palaces we saw two women working on restoring pieces of the walls with new materials. When walking to the buildings it was interesting to see how much was being done just to keep some of the surrounding buildings standing. Metal beams were installed on the outside of many buildings to keep them in place, which tied into what the workers were saying about how at least 30% of the cost of restoration goes toward making the buildings safe enough for people to work on them. 

The article we read for that day was titled “Myths and realities about the recovery of L’Aquila after the earthquake,” which discussed the recovery process in L’Aquila and the research methods that were used in the study. The goal of the article was basically to explain whether or not the recovery of the city is at a halt, to which the answer was no, and that it is still ongoing. The reality is that recovering a city, especially a city that was constructed hundreds of years ago, is a lengthy process. The restoration is more difficult when considering that historical reconstruction takes much longer and must be far more precise than just building from scratch. The article also mentioned that delays in recovery are more related to administrative issues and bureaucracy than directly to the construction process. One more important point from the article is that the phases of recovery are not measures of time, but rather of achievements. Our class discussion on this brought up comparisons between an ancient city like L’Aquila and a fairly new city like Seattle. The consensus of the class was that Seattle would most likely not need to put quite as much effort into reconstruction because there are considerably less historical buildings that would be destroyed, however, the class thought that the damage in Seattle would be more severe because of the freeways that would definitely collapse in an earthquake of the same magnitude as L’Aquila’s.