Patients had to be evacuated from the San Salvatore hospital The
extent of the destruction caused by the L'Aquila earthquake is
being blamed at least in part on a failure to make buildings in
the area earthquake-proof. Experts have pointed to the number of
modern buildings that collapsed in and around the medieval city,
and to a hospital that was badly damaged. Italy seemed worse
prepared than other earthquake-prone countries, they said. Italy
has a long history of earthquakes and there are existing
regulations for protecting buildings against them. The L'Aquila
earthquake was the most deadly in Italy since 1980, when more
than 2,500 people were killed near Naples. After that laws were
introduced obliging construction to be carried out according to
anti-earthquake standards, says Thomas Braun, a seismologist at
Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology. But
those laws are often quietly ignored, observers say. "We have
some buildings that collapsed in and near L'Aquila that were
constructed afte