Causes and Responsibilities
Immediately after the disaster, the government (who at the time owned the dam), politicians and public authorities insisted on attributing the tragedy to an unexpected and unavoidable natural event.
The debate in the newspapers was heavily influenced by politics. The paper l'Unità, the mouthpiece of Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), was the first to denounce the actions of the management and government, as it had previously carried a number of articles by Tina Merlin (it) addressing the behaviour of the SADE management in the Vajont project and elsewhere. Indro Montanelli, then the most influential Italian journalist and a vocal anti-communist, attacked l'Unità and denied any human responsibility: l'Unità and the PCI were dubbed "jackals, speculating on pain and on the dead" in many articles by the Domenica del Corriere and a national campaign poster paid for by Democrazia Cristiana (DC). The catastrophe was attributed only to natural causes and God's will.
The campaign accused the PCI of sending agitprops into the refugee communities, as relief personnel: most of them were partisans from Emilia Romagna who fought on Mount Toc in the Second World War and often had friends in the stricken area.
Democrazia Cristiana, the party of prime minister Giovanni Leone, accused the Communist Party of 'political profiteering' from the tragedy. Leone promised to bring justice to the people killed in the disaster. A few months after he lost the premiership, he became the head of SADE's team of lawyers, who significantly reduced the amount of compensation for the survivors and ruled out payment for at least 600 victims.
The DC's newspaper, La Discussione, called the disaster "a mysterious act of God's love", in an article that drew sharp criticism from l'Unità.
Apart from journalistic attacks and the attempted cover-up from news sources aligned with the government, there had been proven flaws in the geological assessments, and disregard of warnings about the likelihood of a disaster by SADE, ENEL and the government.
The trial was moved to L'Aquila, near Rome, by the judges who heard the preliminary trial, thus preventing public participation, and resulted in lenient sentencing for a handful of the SADE and ENEL engineers. One SADE engineer (Mario Pancini) committed suicide in 1968. The government never sued SADE for damage compensation.
Subsequent engineering analysis has focused on the cause of the landslide, and there is ongoing debate about the contribution of rainfall, dam level changes and earthquakes as triggers of the landslide, as well as differing views about whether it was an old landslide that slipped further or a completely new one.
There were a number of problems with the choice of site for the dam and reservoir: The canyon was steep sided, the river had undercut its banks, the limestone and clay-stone rocks that made up the walls of the canyon were inter-bedded with the slippery clay-like Lias and Dogger Jurassic-period horizons and the Cretaceous-period Malm horizon, all of which were inclined towards the axis of the canyon. In addition, the limestone layers contained many solution caverns that became only more saturated because of rains in September.
Prior to the landslide that caused the overtopping flood, the creep of the regolith had been 0.4 inches per week. In September, this creep reached 10.0 inches per day until finally, the day before the landslide, the creep was measured at 40.0 inches (1 m). At 10:39pm, on the 9th October, it was the sudden and unexpected high speed of the landslide that proved to be catastrophic, and ultimately caused the flood.
Read more about this topic: Vajont Dam