April 10 (Bloomberg) -- Vincenzina Evangelista had just seconds to grab her 12-year-old daughter and flee her apartment in L’Aquila as the building started to crumble.

Less than a week after Italy’s deadliest earthquake in 30 years killed 289 people and reduced the town to rubble, 28,000 displaced locals such as Evangelista are asking why their homes and a hospital refurbished nine years ago buckled so easily.

“I don’t ever expect to return to my home,” said Evangelista, 51, who runs a newspaper stand. “After seeing this, I’ll never trust building codes again.”

Two-thirds of Italy’s territory is earthquake-prone, though only 14 percent of property meets seismic safety standards, according to the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology in Bologna. At 3:32 a.m. on April 6, years of neglect caught up with the country as the quake hit the town in the central Abruzzo region and destroyed 10,000 buildings.

While the heart of L’Aquila was medieval, modern buildings in the town shouldn’t have succumbed to the 6.3-magnitude quake and deaths could have been avoided, said Rui Pinho, head of seismic risk at the European Centre for Earthquake Engineering.

“Nothing on paper has been put into practice,” Pinho said in an interview from Pavia in northern Italy. “Italy is second to none in terms of research and also legislation. It’s when it comes to applying the rules that it all falls apart.”

Rules Delayed

Under pressure from the building sector Italian politicians have repeatedly delayed implementation of a 2005 law that would require private buildings to be made more earthquake resistant, newspaper Corriere della Sera reported today. Two days ago a parliamentary commission submitted a motion to overturn the latest delay -- approved on Feb. 27 -- that pushed the building- code requirement back by one year to June 30, 2010.

Italian President Giorgio Napolitanosaid yesterday that authorities must investigate why building and planning laws apparently weren’t followed in L’Aquila.

“This is not about seeing who is right and who is wrong, who is responsible and who isn’t,” Napolitano said at a press conference after visiting the city. “It’s about finding out how preventive norms that were identified, studied and translated into law were not applied rigorously.”

Pinho’s team was dispatched to L’Aquila to check on the revamped San Salvatore hospital, which was unveiled in 2000, boasting renovations made in reinforced concrete in the 1990s by Milan-based Impregilo SpA, Italy’s largest builder.

Patients Evacuated

When it met its greatest test with the influx of quake victims, its 350 patients had to be evacuated as a wing of the building was destroyed.

A spokesman for Impregilo, who declined to be identified because of company policy, said the builder was responsible for making some improvements in the hospital, not for its construction.

“We looked into the electrical system and the mechanics and the medical equipment,” he said. “We began work in 1991. The structural work was carried out by other companies between 1972 and the mid-1980s.” They are now out of business, he said.

Roberto Marzetti, the hospital’s director, told SkyTG24 television on April 6 that operating tables were unusable. “The state of the hospital is similar to that of the city,” he said.

‘Serious Questions’

“Hospitals should not be collapsing,” Warner Marzocchi, co-chairman of the World Organization of Volcano Observatories, a group representing institutes studying volcanic activity, said in a telephone interview. “That is unacceptable and clearly raises very serious questions.”

Marzocchi is chief scientist at Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology and was among the experts who were on-site hours after the earthquake.

Lawmakers in parliament this week started an investigation into the building of the hospital, said Ignazio Marino, president of the Healthcare and Hygiene Commission.

San Salvatore is just one of 80,000 public buildings in Italy that are unsafe and unfit to cope with a quake, Pinho said. Italy is three decades behind places like California and Japan that are saddled with similar seismic risks, he said.

“Those buildings were the product of the technology of the time,” Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconisaid at a news conference in Rome after returning from L’Aquila, where he toured the ruins. Still, he said, “prosecutors will investigate and if someone can be held responsible, they will be found.”

School Collapse

In October 2002, a year after Berlusconi won his second general election, an earthquake hit the remote village of San Giuliano di Puglia in southern Italy and killed 27 children trapped in the rubble of their school.

That tragedy led to an investigation into whether the building adhered to basic construction rules that would have stopped it from crumbling.

Stricter building legislation was pushed through in 2003 and updated last year. The obstacle is that the cost of applying the improved earthquake-proofing to thousands of schools and hospitals would be “astronomical,” Pinho said. He said he couldn’t be more specific.

Berlusconi this week refused to give an estimate for the cost of reconstructing the quake area, saying it would be “several billion euros.” In the immediate aftermath, the government initially put the price of rebuilding L’Aquila at 1.2 billion euros ($1.6 billion), while risk modeling firm AIR Worldwide Corp. analysts in Boston said the total damage may be 3 billion euros.

Still Standing

“It’s just not been in our culture to construct things the right way in an earthquake zone,” said Enzo Boschi, president of the Rome-based National Geophysical Institute. “After the crisis subsides, we just leave things be.”

Italy may no longer be able to get away with that attitude. In L’Aquila, residents aren’t ready to trust authorities or construction companies any time soon.

“I built my own house and it’s still up,” Piero Tallo, 65, a retired financial adviser. “It’s no coincidence that those buildings that we built ourselves have survived while those handed over to companies have collapsed.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson in Rome at fjackson@bloomberg.net; Adam L. Freeman in L’Aquila at afreeman5@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: April 10, 2009 09:31 EDT