The entry says that the courts took until 1971 to decide which of two commissions was right. This piece sets out what the inquiries found and what the courts did with it: the two technical commissions of the winter of 1963, the parliamentary commission of 1964 to 1965 with its two minority reports, and the trial at L’Aquila that ran from 1968 to 1971. The Italian quotations are in my translation.

The experts

The Minister of Public Works set up a commission of inquiry by decree on 11 October 1963, under Carlo Bozzi, president of the Council of State, and asked the National Research Council to name its scientists: Raimondo Selli, director of the Institute of Geology at Bologna, Livio Trevisan, professor of geology at Pisa, Michele Viparelli, professor of hydraulics at Naples, and the hydraulic engineer Giuseppe Merla. It reported in January 1964, “with admirable promptness and after thorough investigation”, the parliamentary commission wrote, with a geological study and a study of the wave attached. ENEL named its own on 1 November under the lawyer Marcello Frattini, with the geologists Alfredo Boni of Pavia and Francesco Scarsella of Naples, the hydraulicians Costantino Fassò of Cagliari and Filippo Arredi of Rome, and Filippo Falini, who died in a helicopter in the Vajont valley that month while investigating the slide; it reported on 16 January 1964. ENEL also appointed, on 25 January 1964, a disciplinary commission under a retired First President of the Court of Cassation, Luigi Oggioni, to examine the conduct of its own organs, which reported on 20 March.

The experts of the two commissions agreed on what had happened and not on why. The ministerial geologists measured the slide at 1.7 kilometres across, up to 330 metres thick and 280 to 300 million cubic metres, and found “the formidable unity that the outcropping rock material maintained”: “here instead there was a unitary movement, which allowed the various points of the sliding slope to keep their reciprocal position almost unaltered during the whole movement. Indeed even the scarp that bounded the Vajont valley to the south has kept itself in almost all its particulars unaltered in the present front of the landslide.” The mass had behaved not as the rigid limestone it was but as a plastic body, shattered to the decimetre and centimetre, and its base had moved on a succession of ever shallower sliding surfaces, each stopping as the one above went on, so that the front could climb the far side of the valley. On the speed they wrote the sentence the parliamentary commission adopted: “suddenly, at about 22:39 on 9 October, the slope changed its behaviour and set itself in motion with enormous velocities which reached 50 to 60 kilometres an hour. That is, suddenly, in perhaps 100 seconds or at most a few minutes, the velocities became five or six million times greater than the greatest observed before.” The Vajont slide, they concluded, “is the most colossal of those that have occurred in historical times in the Alps and in Europe”. And: “we have no elements to give an explanation of the sudden change of character of the landslide, from a very slow sliding to an exceptionally fast one. Every hypothesis, at the present state of knowledge, would be devoid of concrete arguments.”

ENEL’s experts dwelt on “the exceptionality of the phenomenon”. “The slide that occurred on the evening of 9 October 1963 appears as a wholly exceptional phenomenon for the volume of the mass displaced, the velocity of the movement, the manner of accumulation of the slid material. But still more exceptional does the phenomenon show itself if it is considered in the association of the two elements: mass displaced and velocity of movement.” On the wave they found that the water had reached 930 metres on the right bank, “fully 200 metres above the level of the water before the landslide”, at two points, opposite the dam and 1,100 metres upstream, and that the slide had acted “as a piston which, moving transversely to the valley in a roughly horizontal direction, forced the water occupying the stretch of basin in front of it to rise in the form of a wave which struck the right bank, climbing it to the levels indicated”; the water thrown down the gorge towards Longarone “should be around 30 million cubic metres”. On the movements before 9 October they wrote that today, “after the fact”, they seemed to have been “preliminary movements of the catastrophic sliding”, while before it they could appear “as a sign of a motion which, however generalised, would have given rise to a succession of slides on the bank of the reservoir of relatively modest size, analogous to that of 4 November 1960”. Attempts to find a mechanism linking the slow movements to the collapse “have given no fruit”.

Müller, SADE’s consultant, was asked by ENEL to advise again after the disaster, and the parliamentary commission records his own reading of his forecast. He had expected two masses, east and west of the Massalezza, with different mechanisms, the lower western part on an almost horizontal base from which slices would rotate off the front; he had put the mass under observation at 200 million cubic metres, “but the part that could fall into the reservoir was held to be much smaller”; after the autumn of 1960 he had advised keeping the movement under control by varying the level of the lake, so that successive falls of rock from the front “were to make it possible to create without danger a resistance directed to improving the equilibrium between the pushing forces and the resisting ones”. What had happened, he said, was “completely different from what could have been expected, according to human forecasts, from the numerous studies”.

The parliament

Parliament’s commission was created by the law of 22 May 1964, fifteen senators and fifteen deputies with a president chosen from outside them, Senator Leopoldo Rubinacci, to establish the causes of the catastrophe and the public and private responsibilities, to examine whether the law and administrative practice met the needs of public safety, and to judge the measures taken for the stricken population. It met on 14 July 1964, formed four working groups, was twice prorogued, reported first on relief on 11 May 1965, and on 15 July 1965 communicated its final report to the two chambers with two minority reports attached. Its 248 pages are the fullest account of the affair in print, and it chose, as it says, “to keep itself on the ground of political evaluation”, leaving the question of fault to the courts: “It does not fall within the tasks of the Parliamentary Commission to evaluate whether the characteristics of the landslide of 9 October 1963 (which determined the catastrophe) could have been foreseen. Such an inquiry, in so far as it would have to ascertain the fault of not having foreseen through negligence or inexpertness, is evidently within the province of the Judicial Authority.”

What the majority did say was this. On the slide: “with the knowledge acquired, it is still not known why the landslide fell, and still less is it known by what facts and what circumstances it could have taken on those determining characteristics of size and unity of the mass, of compactness, of velocity and of direction of translation from below upwards of the front of the landslide, characteristics which, in their concurrence, were the determining factors of the magnitude of the wave that, having passed the dam, overwhelmed Longarone and the other villages.” On the forecasts: “The Parliamentary Commission, comparing the ascertained characteristics of the landslide with all the hypotheses formulated, can and must note that the event, as it manifested itself, was foreseen by no one, and that the forecasts formulated, even considered in their worst combination, excluded dangers for the public safety.” The investigations had been continuous and the men the best: Dal Piaz, Penta, Caloi, Müller. “The extreme hypothesis was that formulated by Müller (which absorbed that of Giudici-Semenza)”, which Penta had thought “if anything defective by excess, and beyond which nobody thought one could go. As has been seen, the landslide of 9 October turned out radically different from Müller’s forecasts and joined in itself characteristics which, according to the scientific classifications, appeared incompatible with each other.” On the state: no “condescension” towards the company could be found in the papers, “while from almost all the acts an intent of collaboration emerges”; the reports of Giudici and Semenza, of Müller and of the model tests were known to the administration “although it does not appear that the reports were officially transmitted, as might have been desirable”. On the complaints from outside: they had been about Erto and about expropriated land; “nobody had even indirectly hypothesised the catastrophic phenomenon of the overtopping of the wave above the dam, which was the direct material cause of the disastrous event”; “from August 1961 to the whole of August 1963 it does not appear that there were interventions, reports or solicitations of any kind”. And on the last filling, after finding the application of 20 March 1963 and the authorisation of 4 May formally in order: “There remains, however, a reason for perplexity in the fact that the model tests had indicated in level 700 the limit held to be safe also for a possible overtopping wave towards the Vajont gorge and Longarone.” The experiments at Nove, it added, “remain as an important reference, the more so in that they could not fail to be present to whoever had direct or indirect knowledge of them”. It closed its account of conduct with the two technicians who read the slope, “the engineer Cicco of CONSONDA and the surveyor Dal Prà of ENEL”, who “did not think of evacuating even their families, and perished in the disaster”: a tragic witness, it said, to the convictions of everyone on the mountain.

The first minority report, signed by the eight Communist members, Busetto, Vianello, Gaiani, Lizzero, Scoccimarro, Gianquinto, Vidali and Alicata, began from the other end. “The tragedy could and should have been avoided. We reject the appeal to fatality or to the unleashed forces of nature. We reject the denial of responsibility which, with a claim to objectivity and scientific rigour, relies on the exceptionality of the phenomenon, insisting on the simultaneous fusion of the three elements: volume, velocity and compactness of the landslide, to maintain that each of these three elements could even be foreseen separately, but that the fusion of all three was not foreseeable. One must distinguish between foreseeability and probability. An event productive of damage may be foreseeable but not probable; its foreseeability is enough to create a situation of responsibility. In the case of the Vajont a catastrophic event was certainly foreseeable and probable (otherwise the numerous and costly researches that the concessionary company SADE had carried out would not be explained), even if a certain type of catastrophic event was little probable.” It went through the record and found SADE’s “reckless challenge” to the mountain, the Ministry’s failure to receive or ask for the reports, and the model. “Most grave is the fact that this report was never transmitted to the Ministry of Public Works”; the president of the Superior Council had told the commission he had visited Nove “only in a representative capacity”; and after the tragedy a technician of the Padua institute, Lucio Rizzato, “was arrested at Padua and brought to trial under the charge of having taken the copy of the report that Professor Ghetti, on SADE’s behalf, kept jealously guarded in his offices”, and was acquitted. “The importance of the Ghetti document,” it said, “lies in the fact that the experiments carried out started from the Semenza-Giudici and Müller hypotheses, that is from those which, as reality then showed, turned out to be the most valid. This means that SADE had already discarded the optimistic hypotheses and forecasts of its own geologist Professor Dal Piaz and had instead accepted that of a great landslide event.” Its judgement on the political authority was that “the Public Administration and the political authority kept the truth silent from the populations and the elected bodies”.

The second minority report, by the two Socialist senators Bonacina and Ferroni, was shorter and refused the majority’s conclusions on responsibility for a reason of method: they derived, it said, “from the thesis, rather asserted than demonstrated, according to which the Vajont disaster had all the characters of absolute unforeseeability”, and from the view that before the disaster “all the organs provided with powers of disposition and intervention had functioned or operated as they should”. To the three questions it put, whether the event was unforeseeable, whether everyone had behaved as law and common sense required, and whether the warnings had been “occasional facts, at the moment not worthy of appreciation, or hypotheses so inconsistent that their rejection was right”, it answered “no”, and it described a concessionary company that “collects, evaluates, controls, enriches, selects and keeps for itself all the elements of judgement regarding the geological structure of the ground”.

The court

The Belluno prosecutor had opened an inquiry on 10 October 1963, and in February 1964 the formal investigation named the ENEL engineers Biadene and Pancini, the members of the testing commission Greco, Frosini, Sensidoni and Penta, and Batini of the Superior Council. The examining magistrate, Mario Fabbri, had every document of the Vajont seized and commissioned a college of geologists, geophysicists and hydraulicians, whose work was still going on when the parliamentary commission reported. His committal of February 1968 sent eleven men for trial: Biadene, Pancini, Frosini, Sensidoni, Batini, Penta, Greco, Violin of the Genio Civile of Belluno, Tonini and Marin of SADE, and Ghetti. The trial was moved from Belluno to L’Aquila, in the Abruzzi, far from the survivors. Pancini, who had directed the works at the Vajont and had been on holiday when the mountain came down, killed himself on 24 November 1968, two days before it opened.

The verdict of first instance came on the evening of 17 December 1969. L’Unità’s front page the next morning, under the heading “Only three light sentences!”, carried the figures and a photograph of a woman holding a picture of eight members of her family. “The Tribunal of L’Aquila at 23:00 yesterday, after five hours in council, acquitted five of the accused and sentenced three to six years, of which two wholly remitted. The judges did not find any accused guilty of the crimes of landslide and flood, so that every civil liability of SADE, which built the dam, of the State and of ENEL has also fallen. No compensation will therefore be paid to the survivors. The sentence was received with firm protests from those present, who shouted: ‘Let them kill another two thousand people! Put us in prison, we who have lost our children.’ The prosecutor has announced that he will appeal.” The three were Biadene, Batini and Violin, convicted of multiple manslaughter; the court did not find the slide foreseeable.

The appeal was heard at L’Aquila from 20 July 1970, Batini’s case severed for his health, and decided on 3 October. “Vajont: they are guilty of everything,” the paper’s headline ran, “but only two and light the sentences”: six years for Biadene, “SADE’s man”, three of them remitted, and four years and six months for Sensidoni, “high official of Public Works”, three remitted; “the crimes recognised: landslide with the aggravation of foreseeability, flood and multiple manslaughter”; Violin and Frosini acquitted for insufficient evidence. Marin and Tonini were acquitted because the fact was not a crime, and Ghetti “for not having committed the act”. The Court of Cassation sat from 15 to 25 March 1971 and confirmed the convictions, reducing them to a single crime, flood aggravated by foresight of the event: five years for Biadene, two for the disaster and three for the deaths, with three remitted on grounds of health, and three years and eight months for Sensidoni, three remitted. “Not fatality but a catastrophe provoked,” L’Unità wrote on 26 March; “a bitter judicial battle which avoided by a few days the statute of limitations.” Tonini’s acquittal was changed to one for not having committed the act. Nobody else was convicted of anything, and no SADE director above Biadene was ever charged. The civil claims against ENEL and against Montedison, which had absorbed SADE, ran for another quarter of a century.

Sources

• Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sul disastro del Vajont, Relazione finale, Senato della Repubblica, IV Legislatura, Documento n. 76-bis, 15 July 1965, with the minority reports of Busetto and others and of Bonacina and Ferroni. The two technical commissions and their findings as the report quotes them, Müller’s reading of his forecast, the majority’s conclusions, the two minority reports, and the opening of the judicial inquiry. Read in full in the scan on certifico.com; the quotations are in my translation. certifico.com
• Senato della Repubblica, Archivio storico, Inventario della Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sul disastro del Vajont, 2003: the commission’s law, membership, working groups and the dates of its reports. certifico.com
• L’Unità, 18 December 1969, p. 1; 4 October 1970, p. 5; 26 March 1971, p. 5. The three verdicts as reported, with the survivors’ words. In my translation. 1969, 1970, 1971
• George A. Kiersch, “Vaiont Reservoir Disaster,” Civil Engineering, March 1964, for the ministerial commission’s release of 16 January 1964. archive.org
• Wikipedia (Italian), “Disastro del Vajont,” for the eleven names in Fabbri’s committal, the date of Pancini’s death, the dates of the three hearings and the detail of the verdicts beyond what L’Unità printed. it.wikipedia.org