In the early morning hours of November 11, 1999, tenants in a six-story apartment building in Foggia, Italy, were awakened by loud cracking sounds. Some of the residents quickly realized that their worst fears-fears they had been voicing to local officials for the previous two years-were coming true. Their building was about to collapse. Rushing from their apartments, many residents knocked on neighbors' doors, trying to awaken and warn others. Fifteen people escaped down the stairs and out of the building just minutes before it collapsed with a sickening crash of concrete and metal. All of the remaining sixty-seven residents were killed. A subsequent medical study determined that approximately half the victims sustained fatal injuries and half died from asphyxia, smothered as they were trapped, broken and bleeding, in the rubble heap.

The Foggia tragedy occurred less than a year after a collapse in...