Italy: Cluster quakes and new risks

Following the recent Po valley earthquakes, Corriere della Sera reports that Italy's environment minister Corrado Cini urged, "We need to update the earthquake risk map". “That’s probably right”, agrees Stefano Gresta, president of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (IGNV), adding “but more specifically we need to update the way we read the maps. It’s not enough to take into consideration an area’s low risk factor. What we need to do in order to better understand the problem is combine two maps that we use today. One expresses the probability of a seismic event on the basis of past statistics, from which come the risk factors taken into account by engineers for building purposes, while the other map shows peaks of maximum intensity. Collating the two could provide useful information in more detail than we have today”.