The Unexpected

In the early hours of April 6, 2009, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck the Italian city of L’Aquila. Medieval stone buildings crumbled. Entire apartment blocks pancaked. More than 300 people were killed, thousands injured, and tens of thousands left sleeping in tents, their homes reduced to rubble in seconds.

But the story didn’t begin that morning. It started weeks earlier.

For months, the region had been experiencing low-level tremors — unsettling, but not unusual in this historically seismic part of Italy. The ground was shifting. People were paying attention. Some, understandably, began to ask whether a bigger quake might be coming. Rumors spread. Worry rose. And so, a panel of government scientists and risk officials was called together to evaluate the situation.

The meeting happened. The data was discussed. And afterward, officials went public with a message of calm. One government scientist even went so far as to say that the small tremors were “favorable,” because they helped release seismic pressure — a comment widely interpreted to mean that a major earthquake had become less likely. Some residents who had been sleeping in cars and tents moved back indoors. “They told us to relax,” one survivor said later. “So we did.”

Then, just after 3:30 in the morning, the quake hit.

Entire neighborhoods collapsed in an instant. Rescue crews scrambled. Hospitals overflowed. The aftermath was horrific — and so was the outrage that followed. Within three years, six scientists and one government official were convicted of manslaughter, accused of giving dangerously misleading information. The convictions were later overturned, but the verdict that mattered most had already been delivered by reality.

It wasn’t that the experts had failed to predict the quake. Earthquakes aren’t predictable, not with precision. The failure was something quieter, subtler: a failure to acknowledge uncertainty in a way that could lead to preparation. The public didn’t need a guarantee that disaster was imminent. They needed to understand that it wasn’t off the table — and that the cost of not preparing, if it came, would be devastating.

There’s a lesson in that that has nothing to do with tectonic plates.

Because whether it’s a seismic event or a financial one, the human brain struggles with probabilities. We look for assurances. We cling to averages. We build models based on what’s most likely, and assume that’s enough. And in doing so, we often forget to ask the harder question: what happens if the unlikely actually happens?

That’s the purpose of stress testing a financial plan. Not to forecast disaster, but to imagine it — and then see if the plan still holds. What if markets drop 30% the year after you retire? What if inflation doesn’t cool? What if the roof leaks, the furnace fails, and the job disappears — all in the same twelve months? Stress testing asks whether your financial house can stay standing, even if the ground underneath it suddenly moves.

Most people don't run those scenarios. And most of the time, they're fine. But most of the time isn’t all the time. And no one gets to schedule when the quake hits.

In L’Aquila, some of the people who survived weren’t the ones with the most information. They were the ones who heard the tremors and decided to sleep outside anyway. They acted not out of panic, but prudence — not because they knew what was coming, but because they respected what might.

A good financial plan does the same. It doesn’t just hold up in good weather. It’s built to flex, absorb, and endure — even when the models say the odds are low. Because the day those odds stop being theoretical, it’s too late to change the structure.