Re: earthquake: don't run outside

["Bernard G. Cleyet & Nancy Ann Seese" <georgeann@REDSHIFT.COM>]

Do not, I repeat, do not follow John's advice in a third world country.  There
because of corruption and general incompetence, tall buildings collapse.  If
one can exit the building and get far enuff away from the rubble, fine;
otherwise kiss your ass good by.   If you have a choice pick an old wood frame
one, not the Hilton.

bc

from Z-Net

Quake in India
By Nikos Raptis

Today (Jan. 31, '01) the number of dead from the earthquake that hit India
six days ago is estimated "by officials and aid workers to be from 15,000 to
100,000." The higher estimate came from the Indian Defense Minister, George
Fernandes, as his "personal assessment". Haren Pandya, the Indian Home
Minister, said : "According to our assessment (the figure of dead ) could be
between 15,000 and 20,000" and emphasized that Fernandes's figure was a
"personal assessment".

In Turkey the official figure from the earthquake that hit the country two
years ago was around 16,000. Independent estimates raise the figure to
double the official one. That the state , any state, tends to minimize the
figure of dead from a quake can be expected. The state is taken to be
responsible for the building (seismic) codes, the zoning regulations, the
control of the quality of the building materials, etc. Therefore, the fewer
dead the better the "performance" of the state. In addition fewer dead means
less panic for the population in general.

That the state will try to lie about the number of the dead in a quake can
be clearly seen in the case of the 1976 quake in Tangshan, in China. The
official figure was 255,000 dead. A group of American civil engineers, that
investigated the case, estimated the number of dead to 750,000, three times
the official number.

What one sees in the destroyed cities of India are collapsed multi-story
concrete buildings. Also, what one sees is the rescue of a dozen people (out
of the 20,000 or 100,000) lucky enough to survive in the rabble, some of
them moved out of the rabble after having their trapped limbs amputated, in
situ. Of course this makes an "impressive" story for CNN etc. However, to
understand the enormous forces involved one has only to know that a 33 by 33
feet and 5 inches thick concrete slab (without the adjacent beams) weighs 25
metric tons (or 55,000 pounds). To raise a 25 ton piece of concrete you need
a rather monstrous crane. And it seems that in India there are hundreds if
not thousands of collapsed concrete buildings most of them multi-story.

Since the turn of the 20th century the multi-story steel-reinforced concrete
building has become the most prevalent structure in all countries. For one
hundred years the newspapers have repeatedly carried photos (ad nauseam) of
collapsed concrete buildings after an earthquake, but no state ever
questioned the role of the concrete as a material in the carnage. The number
of dead from quakes during the 20th century, on the basis of the official
figures, is around 2 million.

Concrete is a BRITTLE material, even when reinforced with steel, that cannot
withstand the forces and the deformations due to a quake. The engineers that
design the concrete frames of buildings are the civil engineers. Not all
civil engineers have the training that would help them understand the
behavior of a multi-story concrete building during a quake. But, what is
more important is that of the few that understand there are even fewer that
are radicalized enough politically to come out and tell the truth about
concrete in relation to earthquakes.

That in the twentieth century the collapse of concrete buildings has been
the cause of almost all the deaths from quakes, is a fact. That after a
quake, people rebuild the destroyed buildings with the same materials, steel
reinforced concrete, and in the same manner is also a fact. (The claim of
the various states, after a quake catastrophe, that they will deal
effectively with the next quake by "improving" the code for the design of
quake-resistant structures is a joke).

The quake problem is a political problem. The political significance of the
question of housing the population of a country cannot be overemphasized.
For the governing elite, say in Moscow in the '30s, or in (the US occupied)
Athens in the '50s, or of the post-colonial India, the easiest solution was
(and is) the multi-story concrete frame building. That is a death trap, in
quake-prone areas.

The universities have never faced the earthquake and the deaths from the
repeated failure of concrete buildings as a social problem. All that is done
in the schools of engineering is a desperate effort to marginally improve
the behavior of a concrete structure, an INTRINSICALLY brittle structure,
especially the vertical elements, columns, etc., of the structure.
Universities at quake prone areas should start facing the problem in an
HONEST way.

For the last 50 years the engineering societies (especially the American
Society of Civil Engineers and the American Concrete Institute, two very
important institutions) have produced thousands of pages on the problem,
pages that simply present the efforts for "marginal improvements' carried
out in the Universities.

What is to be done? First, the civil engineers should find the courage (and
the honesty) to really SEE the problem with concrete in relation to an
earthquake. Second the technical universities should do the same. Finally,
the populations themselves should take the problem in their own hands and
start shying away from the market of the multi-story concrete frame
buildings in quake-prone areas.

The solution seems to be lightweight one-story buildings. To the argument
that if we eliminate the multi-story building we shall cover the entire
surface of the earth with one-story ones does not hold. Fifty years ago the
population of Athens was around 8% of the entire population, today it is
around 45 % ! Fifty years ago 92 % of the population lived in one-story
houses in small towns and villages covering a minuscule part of the surface
of the country. The same holds for most countries. Who piled more than half
of the human population in multi-story concrete buildings in monstrous
cities?

Unfortunately people face earthquakes in a similar manner to that of facing
war; in a not rational way. The maxim is: "That's part of life." Tabriz, in
Iran, was razed by quakes and rebuilt on the same foundation and with the
same materials 7 (seven) times, since 634 AD. Today, the ease with which
concrete buildings are built and the barbarity of the (global) elite have
added new terrible dimensions to that old problem of humanity in quake-prone
areas.

It is time that the people in the schools of civil engineering in the
universities (especially in MIT and in Caltech) review the history of
concrete in relation to earthquakes.


2nd part of another commentary:


                                                Earthquakes

Most places on earth that are quake-prone are known.  History has taken care
of that.  (the theory of plates can help also, but it cannot explain why the
biggest quake ever, in 1811 in New Madrid, Missouri, took place at the  middle
of a plate and not at the edges).  Therefore, people at quake-prone areas
know  that they are in trouble.  This trouble has a single parameter:  the
building. All other talk about faults, Richter  scale, etc. is rather
academic.

Since the turn of the 20th century the multi-story steel-reinforced concrete
building has become the most prevalent  structure in all countries.  For
almost one century there have been thousands of pictures, identical to those
in Turkey today, of this kind of buildings that have collapsed during a
quake.  The dead  number in the millions.  In a single quake in China, in
Tangshan in 1976, there were 750,000 dead.  Few people are aware of that and
even  fewer remember.  The basic aspects of the problem:

1. The damage caused by a quake to a building is SITE SPECIFIC, that is a
building can be destroyed while another  one a few feet away remains intact.
There is not much that citizens can do.

2. Concrete is an intrinsically BRITTLE material, even if reinforced with
steel,  especially vertical elements; columns,  etc.  This is the most
important aspect of the problem.  It is a political problem First,.  the state
has exploited to the  hilt the ease with which a building can be constructed
with reinforced concrete.  Second, the cement industry does not care if people
are crushed to a pulp between two concrete slabs of a collapsed  building
during a quake.  They will fight to the end not to lose their profits.
Citizens in quake-prone areas, especially radicals, can do a lot..  However,
it will take many decades to educate the people, find alternative solutions,
etc.

3. A MULTI-STORY concrete building, in a quake-prone area, is definitely a
death  trap. The state has the greatest  responsibility for the quake carnage,
as it is the one that determines the zoning regulations and allows the
erection  of multi-story buildings.  Citizens can do a lot to protect
themselves.  They are the ones that buy or rent the apartments in these
buildings.

4. LIQUEFACTION, the turning of a sandy soil submerged in water into a
virtual  liquid (for a few seconds) during a quake, is a very serious problem,
because one cannot predict if a soil is liquefaction-prone, when choosing the
site to erect a building.  In this case a multi-story building tilts or is
overturned  en bloc.  (Of what I have seen in the news my estimate is that
there were many cases of liquefaction yesterday in Turkey.)  The only thing
citizens can do is press for the prohibition of the construction of
multi-story buildings in areas that  are suspect for liquefaction, especially
by the sea.  Thus, although the quake problem in quake-prone areas seems to be
purely technical,  if studied in depth, it  proves to be mainly political.
The solution rests with the peoples of these areas.  The engineers, as members
of the community, if they decide to be honest, can do a lot..




"John S. Denker" wrote:

> 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.