Anatomy of Destruction

Why is the requirement only 7? Has the government not invested enough in this area?
You cannot require all of the buildings designed to [be fully equipped], because it costs a lot. You have to have larger beam sizes and everything else, so it's a cost consideration. After the Tangshan, China did spend a lot of money to retrofit brick buildings, which suffered the most severe damage during that earthquake. So when you go to China and see all these older brick buildings, there are concrete columns on the corner and ring beams around the buildings to try to keep the building from collapsing. They did a lot of this kind of retrofitting nationwide, but mostly in the cities.

How much of the destruction we're seeing do you think could have or should have been prevented?
That's hard to say, because the existing building structures are much, much larger. It's not like in Beijing or Shanghai—there they just pull down the old building and build a new high-rise. But in the rural areas the larger buildings are the older buildings. From the pictures of the schools, it seems like there was some kind of reinforcement, but it's not well designed because in the steel bar there's no confinement.

Is there still a chance that there could be a miracle rescue of those 900 kids under the school?
I've seen a picture of the two kids that escaped from the school. What they said is that they just ran faster [than their classmates]. Maybe in the short term [they could be rescued], but if it takes too long, they could die. It didn't seem like the schools were designed and built to satisfy the seismic code. I just looked at the ruins in the pictures, and it doesn't seem like the building design considered the impact of earthquakes at all.

So it wouldn't have withstood even an intensity of 7?
No.

Given how active an earthquake region this area of the world is, were Chinese authorities adequately prepared to deal with the disaster?
If earthquakes had hit [in this particular region] very often, they would have required higher design standards there. In the historical record the maximum magnitude is only 7.2 or 7.3. I think they're doing as much as they can. I think it's less than satisfactory in design code enforcement. But there's just such a large stock of existing buildings, you cannot retrofit them all to modern standards. The Chinese government tried to do preparedness education in every city, so I know at least the government is requesting this, but whether or not the local townships are following it, I'm not sure.

How would you compare their preventive efforts to those that take place in other active earthquake zones, like, say, California?
California is much better. In California we retrofit all of the masonry building. In San Francisco and Los Angeles we do that one by one. But China is such a vast area with so many millions and millions of these kinds of older buildings, I don't think the Chinese government can afford to upgrade all of them. But they do try; I think it's fair to say that.

© 2008