The Sicilian Earthquake That Killed Eighty Thousand People in Three Minutes on a December Morning in 1908

At 5:20 AM on Monday 28 December 1908 — substantially the calm of pre-dawn in a city of approximately 150,000 people — a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck the Strait of Messina. The substantial shaking lasted approximately 30 seconds. It destroyed approximately 90% of Messina’s masonry buildings. The earthquake was substantially the dominant event of the first three minutes; the tsunami that followed at 5:23 AM was the second.

The wave

The submarine fault rupture had displaced approximately 200 km³ of seawater in the deep Strait of Messina basin. The resulting tsunami struck both sides of the strait simultaneously. At Messina the wave reached approximately 8 metres; at Reggio Calabria on the opposite (Calabrian) shore approximately 12 metres; at smaller villages along the Sicilian and Calabrian coasts the wave exceeded 10 metres for a 30-km stretch.

The tsunami killed the survivors who had fled the collapsed buildings to the apparent safety of the open waterfront. The timing — three minutes after the earthquake — gave no possibility of organised evacuation.

The dead

Conservative mortality estimates for the combined event run at approximately 75,000–80,000. Some Italian-government statistics ran as high as 100,000–120,000. The scale of the casualties overwhelmed the Italian state’s disaster-response capacity for the first three days; assistance was provided by the international naval flotilla that converged on the Strait through early January 1909 — Russian, British, French, and American warships that had been on Mediterranean station and that diverted to Messina within hours of receiving the news.

The mortality was concentrated in Messina itself (approximately 60,000 of the 150,000 city population) and in Reggio Calabria (approximately 15,000 of the 45,000 city population). Several nearby villages were completely destroyed with no survivors.

What followed

King Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Elena arrived at Messina on 30 December and personally supervised the royal relief effort through January 1909. The subsequent reconstruction of Messina under the Italian state took approximately 25 years; the city was rebuilt on a different street pattern with low-rise reinforced-concrete buildings designed for earthquake resistance.

The 1908 event remains the deadliest earthquake in modern European history. The 1908 mortality is exceeded in the broader Mediterranean only by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake of 1755 — at 30,000–50,000 dead — and substantively only on higher-mortality estimates.

Messina experienced a second major earthquake (magnitude 6.5) in 1894. It has not experienced one since 1908.