Posted on 01/16/2010 8:06:31 PM PST by bruinbirdman
Third World countries like Haiti stand to suffer the most economically.
The strongest earthquake to hit Haiti in more than 200 years crushed thousands of structures, from humble shacks to the National Palace and the headquarters of U.N. peacekeepers.
Destroyed communications made it impossible to tell the extent of destruction from Tuesday afternoon's 7.0-magnitude tremor or to estimate the number of dead lying among the collapsed buildings in Haiti's capital of about 2 million people.
International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally told the Associated Press that an estimated 3 million people may have been affected by the quake and that it would take a day or two for a clear picture of the damage to emerge. Clouds of dust thrown up by falling buildings choked Port-au-Prince for hours.
~snip~
Kathmandu, Nepal, ranked first in the 2001 study, followed by Istanbul, Turkey; Delhi, India; Quito, Ecuador; Manila, Philippines; and Islambad/Rawalpindi, Pakistan--all of which could expect fatalities in the tens of thousands if disaster struck. The only first-world cities on the list were in Japan: Tokyo, Nagoya and Kobe. Fatalities in these cities were estimated in the hundreds, not thousands. Port-au-Prince was not on the list.
Events since then show the estimates to be fairly accurate, if not low. A 2008 earthquake in China's Sichuan province killed perhaps 15,000 people and left thousands buried under heaps of rubble. The magnitude 7.6 quake that struck the Kashmir region of Pakistan in October 2005 killed more than 73,000 people, many in remote parts of the country, not dense urban centers like Islamabad. Geohazard's study predicted a 6.0 hit on Pakistan's capital would kill 12,500 people.
In a 2004 paper Brian E. Tucker of GeoHazards warned the problem would become worse, citing a study of estimated earthquake fatalities based on population growth and construction changes
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Not insane. More vulnerable now than then. I recently worked for a few years at SF's Emergency Communications Department. Regular planning and drills are done for the time when the "big one" hits. All the experts are in agreement that it will be bad. SF has a couple mobile communications vehicles (big as semi-trucks) in case their stationary buildings go down. Emergency supplies are stationed in every City-operated office. I had one next to my desk. Expectations are that survivors will be on their own for a while, because lots of infra-structure will crumble in an earthquake greater than 7.0, not to mention greater than 8.0 as in 1906.
Lots more structures than 1906. Tall skyscrapers with thousands of people in each one, squeezed together on bayfill land. Water mains older than 100 years. Old residential structures a hundred years old built with the same pre-1906 standards. More than a million people during the day packed into a 7x7 mile city. The city is indeed more vulnerable than in 1906.
We are overdue here in LA in several areas. We have the Ft Tejon/San Andreas which the last one was 150 years ago and we have a fault running right underneath Downtown LA that has bot moved on over 200 years. That scientists say is our “big one” and expected to do more damage than the one on the San Andreas Fault. Los Angeles moving north-north east at 1/4 an acre is not helping things one bit.
It is amazing that all the mountains in the LA/Southland area were all made from uplifts from earthquakes.
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