GNGTS 2023 - Atti del 41° Convegno Nazionale

Session 2.1 GNGTS 2023 Fig. 2. Macroseismic postcard. On the top the notes of a member of Seismic Service. Archivio Macrosismico INGV, Rome. The laconic descriptions of the answers were not the only problem for the Seismic Service. Sometimes, in some postcards, the indication of the time of the event was missing: a relevant problem when more than one shock had been felt in a short time interval or on the same day. Frequently, the postcards referring to the same event (they are found in the same bundle in the archive) do not coincide with each other as for the time of the event. The same happens with the date of the event. Frequently the date to which the postcard refers is not the same as the rest of the postcards and the anomaly is signaled in pencil by the Seismic Service member. Usually the postcards with anomalous time indication are merged with the others. The traces of these decisions remain in pencil on the same postcards or on the same band that wraps the handful of postcards. The aforementioned limits and difficulties that the staff of the Seismic Service found in interpreting the macroseismic postcards were sources of uncertainties which were only transferred to a minimal extent to the Bollettino Sismico . The limitations in describing the effects, often with one or two "diagnostics" (and these not necessarily attributable to any scale), lead us to have to compare