Posted on 05/12/2008 12:27:28 AM PDT by Lijahsbubbe
An earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale has hit China's Sichuan province. The tremor was felt across the entire region - shaking buildings in the capital, Beijing, as well as the Thai capital, Bangkok, and Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. US Geological Survey said the quake struck 57 miles north-west of the city of Chengdu at 2.29pm local time (6.28am GMT).
Some 10 million people live in Chengdu.
ping
2 major natural disasters in a short time. Scary. Prayers to all.
7.8 is quite high. However, I don’t know the region in China that it hit that well. But if there was shaking all way from Beijing to Hanoi... it’s gotta be a big one. Hope it struck somewhere where there’s not a lot of people . . . then again it is China.
Oops, should be 2 natural disasters. Delete the “major.”
How about “major natural disasters”.
Like the cyclone disaster, reports of injuries and deaths will be slow in coming out.
After taking a look at Chengdu, China, it does appear the epicenter was located near a mountain range in central China, not too close to any major population centers. We can hope for the best.
This one could be very bad indeed.
With the southern section of the San Andreas fault being 150 years overdue for a bigone and the Hayward fault ready to slip, I would not want to be anywhere near California anytime soon.
This page seems to be useful determining how close the epicenter was to population centers. It’s from the USGS.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/pager/events/us/2008ryan/index.html
I don’t know much about earthquakes at all. But this sounded big.
Drudge is slow on the details. I checked Yahoo news, and didn’t find any new info.
And finally, my last bit of looking at the USGS site indicates around 21,000 people in the ‘extreme exposure zone’.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/pager/events/us/2008ryan/index.html#shakemap
Thanks.
The violent doesn’t sound too cool either. And that’s what, 86 thousand?
That’s what it appears to be. However, I am currently attempting to find the same population map for other significant earthquakes. However, I cannot seem to find it. Using past maps, I was thinking we can get an estimate on how accurate these maps are in predicting damage, and so forth. Your welcome, by the way, the more information we have the better we can look at the whole picture. :-)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080512/ap_on_re_as/china_earthquake
Update here. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how accurate it is.
This is an older population map of China, but you can see that the density of people in Chengdu is greater than anyplace else:
cHINA POPULATION AND DENSITY MAP
The buildings there are typically very old or of suspect construction if they're modern. It's not a particularly modernized province. The effects of this quake could be dreadful.
Also appears, there has been an aftershock. Mag. 6; same area.
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