Many Major Cities Sit on Shaky Ground Washington Post
Many Major Cities Sit on Shaky Ground
Washington Post
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/23/politics/washingtonpost/main6234449.shtml
Megacities are something new on the planet. Earthquakes are something very old. The two are a lethal combination, as seen in the recent tragedy in Port-au-Prince, where more than 200,000 people perished — a catastrophe that scientists say is certain to be repeated somewhere, and probably soon, with death tolls that once again stagger the mind.
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In 1800, there was just one city with more than a million people — Beijing. Now there are 381 urban areas with at least 1 million inhabitants. Urbanization crossed a threshold last year when, for the first time, more people lived in city settings than rural ones. About 403 million people live in cities that face significant seismic hazard, according to a recent study by seismologist Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado.
The next Big One could strike Tokyo, Istanbul, Tehran, Mexico City, New Delhi, Kathmandu or the two metropolises near California’s San Andreas Fault, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Or it could devastate Dhaka, Jakarta, Karachi, Manila, Cairo, Osaka, Lima or Bogota. The list goes on and on.
“You can name about 25 cities that are like Port-au-Prince. They’re not going to shake but every 250 years [on average]. But if you can name 25 of them, you’re going to have an event like this every 10 years,” said David Wald, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
In many vulnerable cities, people are effectively stacked on top of one another in buildings designed as if earthquakes don’t happen. It is not the tremor that kills people in an earthquake but the buildings, routinely constructed on the cheap, using faulty designs and, in some cities, overseen by corrupt inspectors. The difference between life and death is often a matter of how much sand went into the cement or how much steel into a supporting column. Earthquakes might be viewed as acts of God, but their lethality is often a function of masonry.
“In recent earthquakes, buildings have acted as weapons of mass destruction,” Bilham writes in the journal Nature.
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