Earthquake Drills
The Times - Why did so many Chinese schools collapse in the earthquake?
In almost every town and village rocked by China’s massive earthquake distraught parents point to the ruins of a school where their only child died.
Angry citizens have deluged the Government with demands for an explanation and the Government vowed yesterday to punish anyone found to be responsible for shoddy construction.
Yang Rong, the standards director at the Ministry of Housing and Urban - Rural Development, said that officials had been ordered to investigate why so many school buildings crumbled.
Officials revealed that Monday’s 7.9-magnitude earthquake destroyed 6,898 classrooms - and that is before figures have emerged from the two hardest-hit areas of Wenchuan and Beichuan in the steep-sided hills in the north of Sichuan province.
Education and housing officials took the rare move of fielding questions online from Chinese citizens over the many children among the official death toll, which is expected to hit 50,000. …
One said: “China’s Government buildings at every level are more magnificent than those of developed countries, the schoolrooms are worse than Africa’s, who’s to blame!!!”
Hmmm.
Dot Earth (an NYT blog) - Grief, and Rising Anger, Over Fallen Schools
But there’s more focused reporting under way on a question I explored on Tuesday: why schools were death traps instead of havens — or at least built to allow a chance of survival, something earthquake experts and engineers say requires only a few percent of additional investment. I interviewed Xiaonian Duan, an experienced Chinese engineer with the construction consulting firm Arup who specializes in making buildings resilient to seismic jolts. He explained that when vital buildings — schools, hospitals, fire stations — fall in an earthquake, you end up with “a disaster on top of a disaster.”
Then, in an update:
From Time Magazine’s online edition:
“It was built out of tofu,” says Hu Yuefu, 44, of the school building that collapsed in the magnitude 7.9 quake and killed his 15-year-old daughter Huishan. He believes local government officials and the building contractors are responsible. As he speaks, a crowd gathers around to listen and offer their support. “I hope there is an investigation,” Hu says. “Otherwise, there are a thousand parents who would beat them to death.”
Tofu’s a much better analogy than my stale bread crusts.
As weird as it is to me, I guess most people in the world don’t have regular earthquake drills in school, but I always did (it’s a California thing). The alarm goes off and everyone gets under their desk just in case bits of the roof fall in, so they don’t bump you on the head. I think most schools I was in were fairly confident that several tons of concrete weren’t going to come down on those little steel tube desk legs. So, yeah, it’s rather awful to think about, isn’t it.
May 18th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
We don’t have earthquake drills in Australia. It’s a very geologically stable continent. Most of the mountains have been worn down to round hills (one can drive a car to the top of our highest mountain).
However, we did have an earthquake in Newcastle in 1989, in which I had an unusual part. I was out of town during the quake. When I got home (one of a row of townhouses) I saw my garage door buckled in like a truck had backed into it. It wasn’t a truck. The earthquake had opened up a 14 foot diameter coal mine air shaft right under the living room floor. The massive suction caused by the surging water in the old mines had blown all the windows throught the (two storey) house and sucked the contents of my living (TV, stereo, piano, …) down the 150 foot deep shaft.
I was a bit shaky there for a while, imagining what it would have been like if I were home at the time.
The shaft had been capped with a concrete slab but the enormous pressure broke it. After the quake they filled the shaft with concrete. Over a hundred cement trucks worth of concrete. The owners of that house now have a very solid foundation for their living room.
May 18th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
That’s hilarious! …And really really scary.
In Canmore, on the opposite side of town from us, up the mountain a ways was a big mining area back when the Rockies were being mined for coal (before people said, “Well you know, this is kinda pretty… Maybe we should invent ‘National Parks’ or something”), nobody paid any attention to where anyone was digging and now, as the town’s growing, nobody knows where the old mine shafts and tunnels are, so the government’s insured everyone on that side of the town should their house suddenly get sucked into a rather large warren. One wonders how much consolation that would be for the owners, should they be asleep in their beds when the house does its disappearing, but now I guess we have a fair idea.
Btw, we had an earthquake in 1989. In October, though. And it was 6.9, though.
May 19th, 2008 at 2:47 am
Wow Brett!
6,898 classrooms destroyed having trouble with that number.
Never did earthquake drills but was made instead, to recite the location of all fallout shelters within a mile radius my elementary school.