4 ms·

I wonder, could it make sense to build houses in risky areas more like ships?

danieltillett 13y ago
What is required to make a building survive a big quake has been known for some time - the real question is has it been done on the building you are in when the next big quake hits.
- Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
  A friend who lives in Tokyo relatively frequently experiences fairly large quakes - everything shakes, the buildings wobble, you pick the stuff up off the floor and get on with what you were doing. Sure for a really big quake it would be more significant but the engineering there is really impressive.
  - brazzy 13y ago
    Your friend may be exaggerating; I lived in Tokyo for a year and experienced a grand total of two earthquakes that were barely noticeable.
    - Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
      We may be interpreting "relatively" differently.... He's lived there quite a while and has experienced several which have woken him up.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  And more specifically (concerning regional resilience): how much of the existing housing stock is built to standards which will survive a likely quake? San Francisco's last slate-cleaning came in 1906, though parts of the city were constructed far more recently. The 1989 earthquake (nearly 100 km distant and comparatively mild (6.9, as opposed to an 8 or 9 mag such as the 1906 quake) still caused significant structural damage throughout San Francisco, though major damage was limited to a few neighborhoods and specific buildings -- more major damage was concentrated largely to the south, closer to the epicenter. Most of Tokyo was destroyed during WWII, and has been rebuilt since. Japan also experiences frequent powerful earthquakes (several M8+ quakes are noted by the USGS: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/historical_country.php#japan http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/historical_coun...), effectively requiring more robust building standards. Though my understanding is that there's a great deal of collaboration between Japanese and Californian engineers on this work.
  - domdip 13y ago
    1906 was somewhere between 7.8 and 8.25. Pretty far from 9. "8 or 9" is a huge range at that scale.
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      Right. Loma Prieta was pretty serious, particularly closer to the epicenter (and as I recall, damage sort of hopped and skipped among geologically unstable landforms for quite some distance). But it was less than 1/10th as powerful as the 1906 quake. And yes, M9s are monsters -- the Boxing Day and March 11 earthquakes in Indonesia and Japan were both M9s, I believe there was one in Chile ... ok, that was 1960 -- the 1964 Prince William Sound, Alaska, quake was also 9+. Listing at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes On the US West Coast, it's the Oregon / Washington coast which would be most likely to see a quake of that magnitude, along the Cascadia fault, a megathrust fault which could produce similarly large tsunamis as well as massive shaking. For most of California, not so much.

What is required to make a building survive a big quake has been known for some time - the real question is has it been done on the building you are in when the next big quake hits.

Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
A friend who lives in Tokyo relatively frequently experiences fairly large quakes - everything shakes, the buildings wobble, you pick the stuff up off the floor and get on with what you were doing. Sure for a really big quake it would be more significant but the engineering there is really impressive.
- brazzy 13y ago
  Your friend may be exaggerating; I lived in Tokyo for a year and experienced a grand total of two earthquakes that were barely noticeable.
  - Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
    We may be interpreting "relatively" differently.... He's lived there quite a while and has experienced several which have woken him up.
dredmorbius 13y ago
And more specifically (concerning regional resilience): how much of the existing housing stock is built to standards which will survive a likely quake? San Francisco's last slate-cleaning came in 1906, though parts of the city were constructed far more recently. The 1989 earthquake (nearly 100 km distant and comparatively mild (6.9, as opposed to an 8 or 9 mag such as the 1906 quake) still caused significant structural damage throughout San Francisco, though major damage was limited to a few neighborhoods and specific buildings -- more major damage was concentrated largely to the south, closer to the epicenter. Most of Tokyo was destroyed during WWII, and has been rebuilt since. Japan also experiences frequent powerful earthquakes (several M8+ quakes are noted by the USGS: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/historical_country.php#japan http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/historical_coun...), effectively requiring more robust building standards. Though my understanding is that there's a great deal of collaboration between Japanese and Californian engineers on this work.
- domdip 13y ago
  1906 was somewhere between 7.8 and 8.25. Pretty far from 9. "8 or 9" is a huge range at that scale.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Right. Loma Prieta was pretty serious, particularly closer to the epicenter (and as I recall, damage sort of hopped and skipped among geologically unstable landforms for quite some distance). But it was less than 1/10th as powerful as the 1906 quake. And yes, M9s are monsters -- the Boxing Day and March 11 earthquakes in Indonesia and Japan were both M9s, I believe there was one in Chile ... ok, that was 1960 -- the 1964 Prince William Sound, Alaska, quake was also 9+. Listing at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes On the US West Coast, it's the Oregon / Washington coast which would be most likely to see a quake of that magnitude, along the Cascadia fault, a megathrust fault which could produce similarly large tsunamis as well as massive shaking. For most of California, not so much.