I have an article running in The Times on efforts to move away from what the psychologist Paul Slovic calls “gut” thinking, which tends to make people discount long-term threats even if science has delineated them with crystal clarity. The focus is great earthquakes that, without any doubt, will someday hammer great cities. The case study is Istanbul, but it could just as easily be Lima or Katmandu or Karachi or a host of other fast-growing urban centers in developing countries.
Istanbul is best known these days as a thriving commercial hub and tourist spot, but its record of devastating quakes is etched in centuries of artwork, as seen in the slide show below, with the images drawn from the remarkable collection of earthquake art assembled by Jan Kozak in Prague.
The city’s residents, prompted by a close call in 1999 and energized by the calamity in Haiti, are starting to do something rare — cut the risk of big losses with actions taken before the ground heaves. The story describes how the work, while still deemed inadequate by quake specialists, is coming from both the top down and bottom up, ranging from big investments of money by the World Bank to big investments of sweat and time by volunteers training to dig neighbors out of wreckage.
At the top of this post you can click on a short video I shot of action around Istanbul to cut risks before the quake hits.
The stark reality is that, while earthquakes often capture our attention case by case, we have entered an age where population density and persistent poverty are putting enormous numbers of people in harm’s way. As I’ve written here before, after the devastating earthquakes in Haiti and China, simple shifts in how materials are used — not involving higher costs in many cases — can greatly cut the risk of a collapse and mass mortality. Engineers in this field note that earthquakes (mostly) don’t kill people; faulty buildings do. And the vulnerability is not confined to poor countries, as examinations of schools in Japan and Oregon have shown.
Johann Spanner for The New York Times
Children at a school in Istanbul practice their response to a predicted quake.
If you read nothing else (beyond the article and this post), please read the “The Seismic Future of Cities (pdf),” a 2009 paper by Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado, who just returned from Haiti and has been roaming the world weighing which cities are most in harm’s way. (Dr. Bilham also wrote an opinion piece on bad construction in quake zones, focused on Haiti, that ran in Nature last week.)
He is part of a Greek chorus of seismologists and earthquake engineers who have been warning for a long time that some of the world’s biggest, fastest-growing cities are “rubble in waiting,” given the haphazard rush of construction of apartments and workplaces for mainly poor new residents.
As Dr. Bilham explains, the human pulse of population growth and urbanization has come largely in gaps between known megaquakes that have occurred cyclically in a great arc from the European ranges through the Himalayas and across the Pacific. (Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post has written a nice piece on the superimposition of big cities and fault zones.)
Combine the growth and poverty with greed and a lack of governance, he says, and you are building megadisasters.
“Buildings are being constructed right now Pakistan and Iran that are almost designed to kill their occupants when the earthquake comes, and it will,” Dr. Bilham told me.