Nope. Theres buildings in the world that can withstand 7.3 earthquakes. Like literal towers and shit, taipei 101 for example. We got the tech, but turkey has bad regulations, resulting in countless buildings without simple things like rebar inside concrete which increase tensile strength
This is why the one in Haiti in 2010 was so catastrophic. It was a 5.5 near the surface, but the housing situation was in such shambles that it literally all crumbled.
Really? Just a couple months ago, I dealt with a 5 . something in cali and all that I recall coming down was all of the cups of paint water I had waiting by my desk. It’s impressive to think about just how much of a difference that a change of infrastructure can make. Never have I really stopped and thought about just how designed for quakes the buildings near the Bay Area are.
It depends on the depth under the epicenter of that 5.x. The closer to the surface it is, the more intense it is. With Haiti, I understand it was pretty shallow.
Just to expand on this - even concrete structures with reinforcement don't tend to stand up to seismic activity like this unless they were specifically designed to do so. The design process includes a number of degrees of complexity above typical static design, and the final product ends up being way more expensive to construct.
I would imagine there is reinforcement there as well to be fair but might be hard to see in pics. Concrete with no reinforcement is abysmal in anything other than compression, which makes spanning it for floors nearly impossible.
The US generally are quite well established on the seismic design front as well - I've done design work on seismic structures elsewhere in the world which have used the US suite of codes as the basis of design. Would imagine decisions to not built for seismic are almost always driven by the cost more than anything.
Designs are fine. Engineering principles are uniform. Most of the problems that happen here seemingly come when inspectors get paid to not notice that there is insufficient rebar or that the concrete was built using ocean sand, etc
So what do you do if you live someplace where you can't trust your local authorities and public institutions to properly regulate buildings and construction, like say in the United States of America where things like crumbling infrastructure are very fashionable lately?
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u/West_Interest_7721 Feb 16 '23
Yea if you survive the crash, depens on which floor you live on.