Last February, Turkey’s 7.8-magnitude temblor killed more than 59,000 people. The 7.6-magnitude quake that struck western Japan on Monday killed 55.
Why did one nation experience less than 0.1% of the deaths of the other?
In many ways, the countries are similar. Both have multiple active faults and a history of catastrophe. Both have histories of major and repeated geologic trauma.
But a comparison shows that their experiences are vastly different due to planning, preparation and recovery efforts. The sobering challenge for the rest of the world is how to be more like Japan and less like Turkey. While there is no way to prevent an earthquake from occurring, what can be prevented — or at least limited — is the scale of the calamity caused by these inevitable tremors.
“Japan is a leader in disaster risk reduction, resilience and preparedness,” said Michelle Strucke, director of the Humanitarian Agenda at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C. In addition to strong building codes, “they’re quickly able to organize and respond.”
While Turkey has also trained its first responders, they faced a far tougher challenge, she said. The country was hosting large numbers of Syrian refugees in crowded settings. It was slower to enlist international help. And most buildings are constructed of unreinforced brick or masonry, too old to comply with modern building codes, according to research by Middle East Technical University.
How does California compare?
“We’re in between,” said noted seismologist Lucy Jones of the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society. There’s a rule for new buildings, called the life safety standard, that is designed to make the probability of building collapse in an earthquake very low — less than 10% in the worst shaking expected.
But there are ways that California’s buildings could still kill people, she said. One is that the building was constructed before the new standards and not upgraded. Secondl, if there’s local corruption, the building code might not be enforced. Third, a collapse rate lower than 10% could still kill many people in densely populated cities.
“In Japan, there’s less tolerance for failure. And there’s a sense that community matters more than the individual, even if it costs more money,” she said. “We accept more risk than they really are accepting.”
Magnitude:
Both the Japanese and Turkish earthquakes were enormous. And numerically, 7.6 doesn’t seem like much less than 7.8. But earthquakes are measured logarithmically. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake is 1.5 times bigger than a magnitude 7.6 earthquake — and 2 times stronger, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It is the strength, or energy release, that knocks down buildings. In Turkey, a powerful aftershock of magnitude 7.5 followed, destroying buildings that had already been rendered unstable.
Still, Japan has experienced previous earthquakes that far out measure Turkey’s and also performed much better. Its enormous 2011 quake, for example, measured a stunning magnitude 9.1. That earthquake claimed about 15,000 lives, far fewer than Turkey’s. And most people were killed by a powerful tsunami.
Geography:
Japan, with 125 million people, has a much larger population than Turkey, with 85 million. But Monday’s earthquake struck Noto peninsula, surrounded by water on one side.
Turkey’s quake hit a landlocked and populated region on its border with Syria. Hardest hit was the city of Gaziantep, where millions of refugees of Syria’s civil war had sought shelter from that nation’s civil war.
Political conflict:
Unlike Japan, Turkey’s global rescue effort faced deep challenges. This delayed help to the injured, sick and dying.
The Turkish city of Gaziantep was “a region literally on the frontlines of humanitarian response,” according to Erol Yayboke, former director of the Project on Fragility and Mobility at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.Many of the international aid groups that would have helped were already there and suffered their own severe damage, he wrote. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the only United Nations-approved crossing to bring international aid into northwestern Syria was, for a time, not functioning because of damage in the area.
Getting help to the region was further complicated by Syria’s civil war, the division of territory in the region and the acrimonious relations between President Bashar al-Assad and many Western nations, according to the New York Times.
In contrast, Japan is a model of economic and social stability and has taught its residents how to respond to disaster, said Strucke. On Tuesday, just one day after the disaster, Japan already had organized and dispatched 10,000 of its military forces to help rescue and relief efforts
Preparedness:
But the major difference is resiliency. Earthquakes don’t kill — bad buildings do. Japan has made seismic safety a national priority, creating a seismic building code that is considered the most stringent in the world.
“Because of strong, enforced building codes in Japan, the damage is much less than it could have been,” said Jones. Of the deaths, some were in old single-story wooden structures. Others were caused by fire, not toppled structures.
Waves were large, but to warn residents of tsunami risk, a bright yellow warning — “Run!” — flashed across Japanese television screens advising residents in specific areas of the coast to immediately evacuate. For people on high speed trains, service was safely suspended.
Moment of earthquake with the magnitude of 7.5 in Japan. Turkey had witnessed the almost same earthquake in February and lost hundreds of thousands of its citizens. pic.twitter.com/WnHk4ztL9z
— Journalite (@journaIite) January 1, 2024
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Scenes in the Kanazawa station, Ishikawa prefecturepic.twitter.com/3uX5BDlEd4
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 1, 2024
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Japan has learned its lessons the hard way: In 1923, the famed city of Tokyo was destroyed by a 7.9 tremor, killing 105,000 people. Within one year, the Japanese government already had started creating its first building code for earthquake-resistant construction, marking the dawn of the world’s seismic structural design.
During its enormous 2011 quake, the damage in crowded Toyko was limited: High-rise towers oscillated alarmingly for several minutes but did not topple.
Japan experiences so many earthquakes that three specific methods of stabilizing buildings have been developed, which are integrated into the country’s building codes and are strictly enforced. At the minimum, beams, pillars and walls have to be of minimum thickness to cope with shaking. Taller buildings use dampers to absorb energy. The tallest buildings are isolated from the ground by layers of lead, steel and rubber.
Other nations have taken notice. Chile, which experienced the most powerful earthquake ever recorded by the USGS — the 9.5 magnitude Valdivia earthquake of 1960 — also has made significant investment in seismic design and regulation of strict building codes. Recent Chilean earthquakes have caused few, if any, deaths.
In contrast, many of Turkey’s causalities occurred in structures built with substandard materials and allowed to stand by government officials who failed to enforce building codes that require earthquake resistance, the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects’ Chamber of City Planners told the BBC.
The government has provided periodic “construction amnesties” — legal exemptions for the payment of a fee — for structures built without the required safety certificates, the BBC also reported.
Source: Orange County Register
Be First to Comment