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My reading (admittedly via New Scientist) was that the eathquakes hazards guys had prefaced the statement with, 'while we can't rule out the possibility of a large quake', before going on to say that the series of small shocks was normal. It seems that there was also a 'free agent' earthquake predictor who got it half right as well, right time, but wrong place, and this has provoked further criticism of the real pros.
Given that the backbone of Italy, the Apennines, is an uplifted fold and thrust belt above an active subduction zone with extensional tectonics to the west and compression to the east, it's a very unhappy chunk of continental lithosphere. Only a fool would say that a massive quake wasn't 'imminent', and those guys aren't fools. Unfortunately a gesocientist's idea of imminent isn't the same as a local politician's, and we can only imagine the pressure on them not to trigger mass panic everytime they go near a TV camera.
Sadly, despite several proposed mechanisms for 'precursor' events, like EM pulses or patterns of microseisms, nobody has accurately predicted an earthquake on timescales less than a decade. Just when it looks like we've figured one fault system out, the earth breaks along a previously unmapped fault, so strain monitoring isn't working out very well either.
Still - I guarantee nobody will get any grants to further the research after this triumph of sophistry over science.
cheers,
Andrew.
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