EXPERTS: QUAKE COULD CAUSE A MILLION DEATHS By Glennda Chui Mercury News
Scientists warn that the world is heading for a catastrophic earthquake that will kill at least 1 million people.
It won't be the magnitude 10.5 that tipped California into the sea in a recent TV miniseries; quakes don't get that big. The real danger is not in the United States or other parts of the industrialized world at all.
Rather, it's in the huge cities of the developing world, where the building codes that protect the United States either don't exist or are rarely enforced. As those cities grow, millions of people are moving into flimsy buildings within easy reach of major faults.
It wouldn't take a big quake to bring those buildings down. A moderate one would do. A magnitude 6.7 quake in Tehran, Iran, would kill 200,000 to 400,000 people and knock down more than 80 percent of the city's buildings, according to a recent scenario.
In contrast, the slightly larger quake that rocked the Bay Area in 1989 killed just 62 people.
If explosive growth continues in the world's most vulnerable cities, a million-fatality quake is likely to strike at least one of them within the next century, causing death and injury on a scale never seen before, said Roger Bilham, a geophysicist at the University of Colorado.
He said there are now 35 metropolitan areas in the world with populations of 2 million or more within 125 miles of an earthquake zone. They include greater Los Angeles, with a population of 12 million, and the Bay Area, with 7.3 million people.
If the Big One hits a national capital or an unstable region, the political and economic repercussions could rock the globe long after the shaking stops, experts said. Among the possible targets are Tehran; New Delhi, India; Jakarta, Indonesia; Manila, the Philippines; Mexico City; and the tinderbox republics of the former Soviet Union.
``The presidents of these countries are just trying to keep the lid on,'' said Brian Tucker, founder of GeoHazards International in Palo Alto, which works to reduce risk in developing countries. ``It's in our self-interest to make sure these countries can develop without being set back by natural disasters.''
Low priority for many
There's no way to prevent or predict an earthquake. The best way to limit death tolls is to strengthen buildings, roads and bridges and ban construction in hazardous areas. But in countries so poor that people have trouble putting food on the table, planning and retrofitting take low priority.
``People typically say, `I know my building is going to fall down, but I can't afford to move elsewhere,' '' said Ross Stein, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park who has worked extensively in Turkey. ``When you don't have any options, what you want to do is shut it out, not deal with it.''
In the face of a problem that can seem both overwhelming and intractable, a few scientists and engineers have been working at a grass-roots level to raise earthquake awareness and improve building practices in mega-cities.
``It's like pissing in the wind,'' Bilham said. But he adds that there is room for optimism.
With the world's supply of housing set to double in the next 50 years, adding a billion new homes and apartments, ``we actually have a wonderful opportunity to fix the problem'' by constructing buildings that will stand up to earthquakes, Bilham said. ``In fact, it only costs 10 percent more to put up an earthquake-resistant house.''
Yet people rarely make that investment, he said: ``It's partly graft and partly people really taking the low bid. It's appalling, it's shameful, that we live on a planet where we allow it. The buildings that people live in are their burial points.''
Two earthquakes last year show what a difference strong buildings can make. Both were moderate. Each released far less destructive energy than 1989's Loma Prieta quake in the Bay Area.
On Dec. 22, the 6.5 San Simeon quake on the central coast of California rocked buildings from Orange County to San Francisco. Yet it claimed only two victims, crushed when an old clock tower fell.
Four days later, a 6.6 quake struck the ancient mud-brick city of Bam in Iran, killing at least 26,200 people -- nearly one of five people in the area. Seventy percent of the city was flattened.
Neither quake hit a highly populated area. If they had, the contrasts would be even more striking.
A magnitude 7 earthquake in southern Los Angeles County would cause $100 billion in direct damage but kill only about 400 people, according to a scenario drawn up by Fouad Bendimerad of Risk Management Solutions in Newark.
In Iran, active faults that run through and around the capital of Tehran have already produced four or five earthquakes of at least magnitude 7, the last one in 1830, said Manuel Berberian, a seismologist with Najerian Associates in New Jersey. Today, he said, with a population of more than 7 million, the city is a bomb waiting to explode.
``Most of the ordinary houses are not designed to withstand an earthquake,'' Berberian said. ``Imagine if only 50 percent of the population dies. We are talking about an international disaster.''
The danger is such that the Iranian government is considering moving the capital from Tehran into a safer area, according to news reports after the Bam earthquake.
A push for safety?
As the world's population swells, the danger grows. The United Nations projects that 2 billion more people will live on the planet three decades from now -- and almost all of that growth will take place in the vulnerable cities of the developing world.
Tucker said the situation is so dire that it's time for earthquake scientists and engineers to shed their traditional objectivity and form a global organization, like the Sierra Club or Amnesty International, to push for earthquake safety.
Kerry Sieh, a geologist with the California Institute of Technology, points out that it took a long time for California to become as earthquake-resistant as it is today, with a series of laws during the past 70 years that strengthened schools, hospitals, freeways and other structures.
``We now have probably cut our loss of life in any given earthquake by at least a factor of 10,'' he said. ``I'm not completely fatalistic. I think what you do is chip away at the edges of the problem.''
