Posted on 01/04/2021 7:24:26 AM PST by RomanSoldier19
DURRES, Albania — Still bleeding, the gash on his hand covered in dirty gauze, Xhafer Ahmetaj surveyed the mountain of rubble where his friends had been buried after an earthquake struck.
Only one teenage boy was pulled out alive. Eight other members of the Lala family, including two toddlers, were killed in November’s 6.4-magnitude quake. Mr. Ahmetaj, 79, a former military officer, took in the devastation and shook his head.
Nature, at its most violent, was to blame. But so, too, were people at their most greedy.
“If you would have seen this place when it was a marsh, a place where people came to fish, you wouldn’t think houses could ever have been built here,” Mr. Ahmetaj said. Yet they were built — the construction often compromised by corruption — in a pattern repeated across Albania, a small Balkan nation.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Date: July 2, 2020 Source: Kumamoto University Summary:
Abnormal rises in groundwater levels after large earthquakes has been observed all over the world, but the cause has remained unknown due to a lack of comparative data before and after earthquakes. After the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes, a collaboration of scientists from Japan and the US analyzed stable isotope ratios of water samples collected before and after the disaster. This allowed them to clarify the cause of the rise in water level.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200702113713.htm
“Albania has the distinction of being the only country ever destroyed by a chain letter.” - P.J. O’Rourke (Eat the Rich)
“Mr. Ahmetaj, 79, a former military officer,”
Who would have served under the stalinist dictatorship of Hoxha.
Just about all the construction of buildings, big or small, in Soviet Russia and its East European satellite states was done poorly.
I visited Moscow as a tourist in 1991 just after the communist dictatorship ended and stayed in a big hotel that had been built for guests and students from countries (mostly 3rd world and S. America) that the Soviets wanted to impress. It was made cheaper than a run-down motel6 and stunk as the Soviets never seemed to figure out to use the plumbing U shape pipe on the waste lines.
I again visited Russia in 2011 and new hotels had been built by investors from the west and these were as nice as you would find in western Europe.
Inshallah...
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