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A lot of the heritage buildings are not designed to survive the kind of earthquakes that Seattle is prone to. So you can either tear them down now for developme
by idlewords 9y ago
A lot of the heritage buildings are not designed to survive the kind of earthquakes that Seattle is prone to. So you can either tear them down now for development, or let the Big One do it later, with great loss of life.
- walrus01 9y agoheritage brick buildings look quaint and cute, sure, but dying crushed to death by bricks and mortar in a 7.7 earthquake seems like a pretty bad way to go. There are ways to structurally retrofit them to modern standards, a lot of the 100+ year old buildings in Vancouver's gastown have internal X-bracing of steel beams and earthquake retrofits, but it's not cheap.
- idlewords 9y agoSeattle and Vancouver need to plan for 8+ earthquakes. There shouldn't be a single brick building in either city.
- njarboe 9y agoThere have been seven large Cascadia subduction zone earthquakes in the last 3500 yrs or so. About a 500 year repeat interval. The last one was in precisely 1700, known from historical records. So, on average, the next one would be in 200 yrs (but could come tomorrow or even further into the future). Building new construction to survive such a quake is probably a good idea, but tearing down old ones seems like not the best investment in resources given such a low probability event.