The legal status of Uncertainty

Abstract

Abstract.An exponential improvement of numerical weather prediction (NWP) models was observed during the last decade (Lynch, 2008). Civil Protection (CP) systems exploited Meteo services in order to redeploy their actions towards the prediction and prevention of events rather than towards an exclusively response-oriented mechanism 1 .Nevertheless, experience tells us that NWP models, even if assisted by real time observations, are far from being deterministic. Complications frequently emerge in medium to long range forecasting, which are subject to sudden modifications. On the other hand, short term forecasts, if seen through the lens of criminal trials 2 , are to the same extent, scarcely reliable (Molini et al., 2009).One particular episode related with wrong forecasts, in the Italian panorama, has deeply frightened CP operators as the NWP model in force missed a meteorological adversity which, in fact, caused death and dealt severe damage in the province of Vibo Valentia (2006). This event turned into a very discussed trial, lasting over three years, and intended against whom assumed the legal position of guardianship within the CP. A first set of data is now available showing that in concomitance with the trial of Vibo Valentia the number of alerts issued raised almost three folds. We sustain the hypothesis that the beginning of the process of overcriminalization (Husak, 2008) of CPs is currently increasing the number of false alerts with the consequent effect of weakening alert perception and response by the citizenship (Brezntiz, 1984).

Understanding the decision-making process in disaster risk monitoring and early-warning: A case study within a control room in Brazil

“…Control rooms can be found in nuclear power plants [30,11,31], mineral processing plants [28,29], oil refineries [48], emergency warning systems [36,23,3,49]. Although these existing works investigate the physical design of a room and its technological tools, only few of them are focused on analyzing organizational theory and issues [9,60,50].…”

“…However, although these works have resulted in a better understanding of the procedural, cultural, and social aspects of control rooms in different scenarios, the challenge now is to recognize how those factors can influence decision-making in control rooms for disaster risk monitoring. This is particularly important once activities carried out by operators are often affected not only by the cognitive skills of each operator [3,14,29] but also by communication and collaboration between them [32,14,3]. As stated by Reed [45], decisionmaking preferences in organizations are often inconsistent, unstable, and externally driven; the linkages between decisions and actions are loosely-coupled and interactive rather than linear.…”

Brief Communication: The dark side of risk and crisis communication: legal conflicts and responsibility allocation

“…Between 2006 and 2009, the percentage of false positive meteohydrogeological alerts issued in Italy rose from 37 to 65 % (Altamura et al, 2011).…”

“…Several authors argue that the key reasons are not to be found in a rapid increase in meteorological events, but rather in the increase of legal cases involving the authorities in charge of issuing the warning (DPCM and CIMA, 2013;Altamura et al, 2011). In order not to face legal charges in case of a missed alarm, emergency managers adopted selfprotective behaviours by issuing a larger number of false positive alerts.…”

“…This is not a unique example. Several authors maintain that there is a growing trend of legal conflicts regarding the allocation of responsibility for disaster risk management, or even an over criminalisation of civil protection officers (Cedervall Lauta, 2015;DPCM and CIMA, 2013;Sterett, 2013;Altamura et al, 2011). This trend may have several collateral effects that will be described in the following sections.…”