Chapter 5: Desperately Seeking Signal Summary and Analysis

On a Sunday evening in L'Aquila, Italy, people were preparing for bed when they felt two mild tremors. The tremors were magnitude 3.9 and magnitude 3.5 earthquakes. They were small magnitude quakes but they were the seventh and eighth in a cluster measuring magnitude 3 or more in a week. Sulmona, a nearby city, had recently had an earthquake scare. A technician named Giampaolo Giuliani who worked at Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics, had detected high levels of radon, a possible precursor of an earthquake. He warned the mayor but later was fined for scaring the public. Although the frequency of the L'Aquila quakes was unusual, the city officials told the people they were safe. However, Monday morning a magnitude 6.3 hit L'Aquila killing more than 300 and leaving 65,000 homeless and $16 billion in damage in its wake. The city...