By this definition, our Michael Fish, the weather forecaster who denied that there would be a hurricane (although technically he was right, it wasn't a hurricane and he DID say it would be very windy) just before the 1987 storm which killed 22 people should have been jailed.
Your comparison to your fathers job watching a gauge is inaccurate, because if the dial moves too far, then he calls in the other guys and they make the assessment to evacuate the mine or not (Presumably) but as any geologist or vulcanologist that works in the public eye will tell you, they face a catch-22 situation whenever a scenario presents itself where there is a possibility that an earthquake may occur or a volcano may erupt, because there is a 50/50 chance of it happening. Now, if they sound the alarm, the area is evacuated, businesses close, the economy is effected and people have to leave belongings behind. Now, if the earthquake happens or the volcano erupts then all well and good, people have been saved, the geologists and vulcanologists are hailed as heroes and the rebuilding begins...but if nothing happens, then the geologists and vulcanologists are accused of scaremongering, and no-one listens to them.
Sometimes they can come under a lot of pressure from government officials NOT to declare a situation because of the effect it would have on the economy and the chance that it might not come to pass.
A swarm of earthquakes in an area can be an indication of a future major earthquake, or it can just be a fault line letting off steam, there is no way to tell until it happens.
Even Japan, which has the best earthquake detection system in the world, with over a thousand seismographs employed, could only give a minutes warning before the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Scientists in Japan had predicted that the 'Big One' which they anticipated would occur at some point in the future, would occur further south towards Tokyo but they couldn't be sure where it would happen until it happened.
Earthquakes and volcanoes are very hard to predict accurately, although volcanoes are a bit easier than earthquakes as they show more visible signs of an eruption than earthquakes do, but we are getting better at earthquake prediction than we were even twenty years ago, but it's still not an exact science, and for Italy to jail these men for making a bad call is absolute nonsense and I don't blame the head of the Italian disaster organisation for resigning in protest, it's going to set a dangerous precedent when Italian seismologists will be more concerned with their public appearance than potentially getting a warning out, if anything it's going to make them more reluctant to commit to a yes or no, and put the Italian people at more risk.
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