DECIDING IN AN EMERGENCY: AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY. THE CASE OF THE BELICE VALLEY EARTHQUAKE (SICILY, 1968)

Abstract

On January 15, 1968, two earthquakes, followed by multiple aftershocks, devastated 14 towns
and villages of the Belice Valley, a rural and marginal area of southwestern Sicily. In the aftermath
of this disaster, the regional and national authorities decided to combine ‘reconstruction and
development’ and a transformative rebuilding of the destroyed towns was associated with
a large-scale plan for the industrialization of the area. This article investigates the roots, the
making and the consequences of this decision by adopting an environmental history approach.
It discusses the role that the earthquake itself played in the decision-making by analyzing the
shifts in the expectations and actions of multiple actors. These include the local population,
the regional institutions, and the national authorities, all of whom were concerned about the
future of the valley before, during and after the emergency. It does so by using a rich corpus
of primary sources. This case study therefore demonstrates the importance of taking into
account the role of natural contingencies in the historical analysis of decision-making, especially
in relation to planning decisions. Moreover, this article reveals that emergency decisions on
environmental crises can reverberate at temporal scales that are not necessarily taken into
account by decision-makers.