Re: earthquake: don't run outside

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 12:49 AM 3/1/01 -0800, Michael Bowen wrote:
>  The surface wave speed (a few km/s) is slow enough that
> California is considering installing an electronic alarm system on the
> San Andreas fault to give Los Angeles-area schools a few seconds, or
> perhaps up to a full minute, advance warning of major shaking, with
> the hope that this would be enough time to evacuate classrooms.

Evacuate?  Really?  All the standard earthquake preparedness instructions
say if you are inside, stay there;  get under a desk or stand in a strong
place like a doorway.  For example
  http://earthquake.usgs.gov/faq/prepare.html
  http://www.quakedefense.com/prepared.htm
and many others....

The rationale is that buildings rarely collapse entirely.  Far more often,
all sorts of stuff breaks loose from the outside walls, raining onto all
the people who just ran outside.  I would much rather be hit by a
fiberboard ceiling tile falling from a few feet up than by a piece of plate
glass falling from N stories up.

At the next level of detail:  Tall buildings these days are built of
steel;  the outside wall is held up by the skeleton, not the other way
around.  It is entirely plausible to have large pieces of wall fall off, in
such a way that people inside are vastly safer than people outside nearby.

I know it is intuitively appealing to run outside, but that doesn't make it
wise.