That is an amazing and unsettling photograph.  The explanation in Science for this phenomenon certainly sounds plausible. I was viewing some heart - rendering photos this morning of children being extracted from the rubble and of some children that didn't make it in the aftermath of yesterday's horrible earthquake in Sichuan. Before I even heard any details on the quality of the buildings in Sichuan, I was telling my girlfriend Sheena that almost certainly, many people died because of shoddy building practices. That phenomenon is of course ubiquitous in poor countries (though China has come so far in so many ways since the death of the ghastly Mao Zhedong).

It's interesting how much we contribute to these disasters.  And I don't just mean shoddy construction, though that is of course always pervasive.  But population explosion just makes these disasters so much worse.  People live on hurricane-ridden coasts and mudelid and wildfire infected hills.   It would be enough to make one say that Mother Gaia is reacting against us and restoring order, if one wanted to get jacked in the nuts.

"this was as much a manmade disaster as a natural tragedy. "

They all are, Brad. It's not a disaster if there's no one there when it happens. Human practices make all the difference, which is why hundreds of thousands of people die in developing countries while 1st world countries are horrified by deaths over 10 from natural events.

We're not immune here, though. I suspect no one on the coasts noticed the latest earthquakes in southern Illinois, but the New Madrid fault zone running through the region has St Louis on one of the highest earthquake threats this side of the Sierras. And very little out here is built or maintained to an appropriate code. The USGS currently "estimates a 7 to 10 percent chance, in the next 50 years, of a repeat of a major earthquake like those that occurred in 1811-1812, which likely had magnitudes of between 7.5 and 8.0. There is a 25 to 40 percent chance, in a 50-year time span, of a magnitude 6.0 or greater earthquake." That's comparable to the Sichuan earthquake.

California's a poster child for this dynamic, as they seem hell-bent on allowing development next to and in the path of basically every type of natural event possible. But communities keep allowing development along and behind levees on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, New Orleans is going to be rebuilt, no one cares that Florida keeps urbanizing their coastline, and so on. You can't keep people entirely out of harm's way without eradicating humans, but we go far over the line between reasonable caution and careless hubris.

Even when buildings are built to state - of  - the art standards, there is still peril. Remember Kobe, 1995.

BTW, for readers unfamiliar with the fault that literatehobo cites, it is prounounced New Mad - rid, not like the capital of Spain.

Enough of the Gaia nonsense, Boneill. That was an excellent deconstruction of James Lovelock's fraudulent concept in the Skeptical Inquirer a few short years ago.

I think bone was speaking metaphorically, not promoting the Gaia hypothesis, lib.

Literatehobo, Brad Plumer: Excellent posts. People deforest and build and often only think - if at all - about the consequences later.

Wow. Those lightning storms really are jaw-dropping. Another interesting post on E&E. Thanks, Brad.

Brad,

The mangroves are an excellent example, and quite analagous to our own systematic destruction of Louisiana's coastal wetlands that historically provided a significant buffer against hurricanes and storm surge in particular. Pack as many people into Cajun country as Myanmar does, and Katrina would have been even more horrific. Same dynamic, though. Also, for those who dismiss the effects of climate change (man-made or otherwise) as miniscule, even a few inches rise in sea level can translate into far more land flooded by a storm surge in areas as flat as coastal deltas.

Reformer,

Knowing bone, he was being funny, not literal. And you're right that codes are no guarantee, but their absense certainly makes a bad situation worse. Folks forget that even with strict codes for new buildings, it's the retrofitting of thousands of older structures that is often difficult if not impossible. For example, good luck finding funding and will to rebuild every house and building in St Louis, SE Missouri, southern IL, and western Tennessee to California-level standards, with no certainty that a big quake will ever happen. Of course, if/when it does happen, we'll be spending ten times that amount to rebuild, and the same people who whine about being required to purchase earthquake insurance in the Midwest will be pleading for government relief. It's amazing how quickly hardship converts libertarians into socialists.

literate and brad make valid points about many of these man-made disasters. We have a tendency to ignore the realities of naturally occurring phenomenon - earth quakes, tsunamis, typhoons, hurricanes, seasonal floods, volcanic eruptions and subsequent pyroclastic flows, tornadoes, etc. is the humans tend to build in the locations that are the most dangerous to build in because of the exposure to such phenomena but also because these tend to be the most beautiful places as well.

We would do well to take the cautionary road of past disasters and evaluate the human actions that exacerbate the problem. Florida drains the Everglades and its freshwater mangroves for land, thus depleting freshwater filtration capabilities and storm buffering of the Everglades. Rip wrapping, rerouting and leveeing the Mississippi River increases flood damage costs and depletes the Louisiana gulf coast of shoreline building silts which leads to further gulf-coast erosion and increases storm damage from surges, tropic storms and hurricanes.

Man's capacity to design and engineer solutions to "fixing" and "controlling" Mother Nature is a futile effort at best. Instead of following best practice management and spending dollars up front to build better designed structures we could mitigate the damages  and loss of life. We won't eliminate the complete loss of lives and structures or cost of damage but we can minimize them.

Proper building codes can reduce the damage from earth quakes but designing and constructing earthquake resistant buildings is not cheap. Even retrofits can be costly. Most people don't realize how precipitous the nature of Seattle is in regards to earth quake wipe out and yet they have as stringent building code requirements as California and Japan.

China's speed at which they build new structures also attributed to the collapse of these buildings in that low quality concrete, improper reinforcing, lax code and inspections. The designing of quake resistant buildings and retrofitting older ones in quake prone areas is probably the last thing on Chinese authorities' minds when under Party pressure to grow and build at unsustainable rates. Probably the good that will come out of this disaster is the implementation of the international building code to ensure at least a baseline level of design and construction for life-safety and well-fare. At a minimum, the buildings should be designed to stand long enough to allow everyone inside to escape with minimal harm. Buildings can be rebuilt but lives lost can't be.

singlespeed,

All valid points, but how do you actually go about DOING any of that in a democracy and culture like ours, which is strongly biased toward short-term decision making? Other than granting Al Gore a benevolent dictatorship...

Fascinating and productive discussion. But no one has raised the question of priorities laid out against the ordinate of spending. Literatehobo: As the most literate one among us here on these matters, could you please speak to my question? We have to practice some sort of risk - management triage. We could spend the entire $13 trillion GDP on averting risks but there has to be hard decisions made. I know that this is economic talk and laypeople are frequently aghast at pricing lives but it happens all the time, people just don't realize it. How do we prioritize?

Yeah, libref- you have to take my jackass personality in account.

To not asnwer your question, I don't know.  You can make things incredibly expensive, make buliding costs and insurance rates so high it seem to be prohibitively costly, but there will always be some jackass millionaires who want beachfront property.  But that is kind of a strawman.  People in tornado alley, along the New Madrid, in Biloxi or New Orleans, aren't rich enough to afford that kind of stuff.  They aren't there because of natural beauty (mostly, anyway).   I'm pretty sure Hobo doesn't live near the Madrid zone because he is a decadent millionaire.  

I don't think there is really much a government can do.  We can't shluff everyone off to Minnesota.   I think just maintaining codes, or maybe providing tax incentives for inland housing in, like Florida.  But most people don't think about twisters when buyng property- they are looking at what is best for right now.   Not much anyone can do about that.

literate...the simplest solution to reducing the cost of building in "catastrophe" zones is not allow it. Of course this is almost impossible. I doubt those snow-birds and soccer moms will give up their Florida lifestyle of big houses, a/c and screened-in outdoor pools for another location. Be that as it may, by making permitting more difficult for large developers to mitigate them from building housing in flood zones, or reclaimed rubbish piles. Insurance companies are now actually forcing that hand by not giving insurance coverage for wildfire, flood and hurricane zones now or are for very high premiums. Couple that with regional legislation that discourages developing in sensitive areas could go a long way.

But the question of how you address the quake isues....you can't make something disaster proof but you could make them more resistant. Some areas...like the outer banks where natural erosion patterns wash away beaches that are rebuilt with federal dollars to "restore" beach heads for vacation homes is just a wast of dollars. As much as it's nice to walk out the door and be yards from the water is nice but with that risk comes responsibility. If you decide to build there, you have to design and build appropriately. Doing stuff on the cheap and short term is the American way these days and it's difficult to get people to take the long road. Hell getting folks to think 5 years out is tough, let alone envisioning a master plan that will take decades to implement is difficult equally so.

But we can either rest on our wilted laurels and say "good job Brownie" and hope with crossed figers that we'll do ok using the "value engineering" approach to life or try to do the best possible thing you can for the long term. I think we'll start to see regional responses to some issues and others will just keep doing what they do because they abide by "the buy cheap now, replace later" mentality.

Reformer,

First of all, there are two types of natural risk to be assessed here: regional and localized.

The former encompasses natural hazards that affect larger areas indiscriminately, and cannot be avoided without shunning a large area. Little or nothing in the specific placement of buildings or infrastructure affects the overall risk significantly. Natural hazards in this category include tornadoes/general storms, blizzards/ice storms, and the regional effects of volcanoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes. For example, it is not practical to move all humans out of the area potentially affected by the San Andreas or Mt Rainier, and there is little one can do about tornadoes other than building shelters and paying attention. These are natural hazards that we should be aware of, but cannot significantly alter our relationship with.

The latter encompasses small-scale, focused, and/or direct effects of natural hazards. For example, mudslides and floods happen in known, mappable, definable basins and paths. It is possible to delineate these zones and avoid building in them whenever possible. Localized effects of volcanoes such as lahar and pyroclastic flows can also be predicted and mapped to an extent, and human infrastructure can be avoided. Faults can, to an extent, be mapped and efforts made to reduce development pressure very close to them. Hurricanes' regional effects are unavoidable, but their local effects on shorelines are quite predictable and avoidable with proper policy.

As a specific example of the relationship between these risks, consider the Seattle area. Obviously one cannot avoid exposing millions of people to the general threats from Mt Rainier (ash, etc.). However, a great deal of development is occuring on the slopes leading up to Rainier, typically along broad, flat areas that geologists recognize as old mudflow/lahar paths from earlier eruptions. If you overlay a map of development patterns in the area with a map of lahar deposits, you see a quite impressive correlation. We're building these exurban communities right up the throats of the shotgun pointed at them, because the land is easier to build on, there hasn't been an eruption in recent memory, and un-science-educated people think the prime risk from stratovolcano eruptions is out the top, not down the sides. So risk-management triage in the Seattle area might accept that we cannot protect the entire city, but we can sure as hell attempt to restrict development in known areas of previous volcanic mudflow paths. Even if people insist on building toward the mountain, perhaps zone these mudflow paths for commercial/industrial and attempt to keep housing and schools on higher ground where they may be covered in 12" of ash but not buried in 12' of mud.

That's the top-down approach; policy, zoning, etc. The bottom-up approach would be to free insurance companies to have more leeway in pricing policies based on risk, to create economic conditions that push development and use patterns into safer areas. This runs the risk of devastating local communities, so I might propose using a form of grandfathering. Insurance companies can't change the rate of existing customers, but any new development or land sales are subject to true market forces in acquiring insurance. And anyone who chooses not to have insurance, or cannot get it, is not eligible for any government aid beyond preservation of life. This allows existing communities to keep their way of life, which practically we can't change, but puts great market pressure on keeping the problem from getting any worse.

We might also institute a policy whereby government will not pay a penny to rebuild infrastructure in areas subject to localized risk. So development in floodplains, mudflow paths, hurricane-prone coastal areas, and so on continues to exist, but once it's wiped out by a natural event, no taxpayer money goes to rebuild it because the danger has been demonstrated. Allow people to take the chances as independant adults, but make it clear that government's role is not to subsidize and bail out that sort of risk-taking. If a private individual or company wishes to take a calculated risk, let them, but they're on their own.

These are long-term approaches that will use the market to start shifting attitudes and methods away from risky areas. In the short term, we have millions of people at great risk all over the US, and I don't have a good solution to that, because practically dealing with it means uprooting established communities. I think we just need to move aggressively toward not making it any worse, and instituting policies that will inflience better decisions post-disaster so that the same mistakes are not repeated as they are now.

New at 10: humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions!!

We're all going to DIE!!

Yes, every last one of us!

AGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Literatehobo: Thank you for the detailed, eloquent reply. I happen to live in Seattle and I have told people forever that this is a great place; temperate climate, no hurricanes or tornadoes (with rare exceptions), no flooding (only if you quite a ways out of the city, next to the Skagit River, say. Though only wild card is the string of dormant volcanoes that could make this state nigh on uninhabitable if a number of them went off simultaneously.

liberal reformer, you have put your finger exactly on the problem. If we underbuild, we put lives at needless risk. But if we overbuild, we waste a lot of money preparing for a risk that is small (and perhaps ignore a more dangerous hazard because we blew our money on the wrong thing).

The answer is that we need to do research to get the best possible estimate of the risks, and base our mitigation decisions on the basis of the best information we have. The more we know, the more informed our decisions can be. Full disclosure: earthquake hazard research is part of what I do for a living, but I would say the same about hurricanes or other hazards. Fund the basic research that educates us about the risks we face, and fund people to integrate that work into a digestible form for policymakers. Then make the policies that are best according to our knowledge, and enforce them,

literatehobo: excellent post. There can be difficulties, though, in grandfathering existing customers (the people or the properties? If nobody but the current owner can get insurance, the value of the property drops way down). But I agree 100% with the rest of your post.

liberal reformer: I'm not trying to scare, but you are neglecting the wild card of a repeat of the 1700AD magnitude 9 Cascadia earthquake. It is not likely in our lifetimes, because earthquakes so large only happen every several hundred years on average, but it could be as bad as the 2004 Indian Ocean event (probably a bit smaller), only in our country. The 1700AD earthquake, by the way, was dated to within a day by a combination of records of a tsunami n Japan with no earthquake i, and tree-ring dating of abrupt subsidence on the coast of Washington and Oregon. The Wikipedia entry for this looks to be accurate, if you are curious.

liberal reformer,

On the bright side, volcanoes give lots of warning.  Even when people talk about "sudden" or "unexpected" volcanic awakenings, that's really after days of, at minimum, ground tremors and other activity indicating that things are changing underfoot.

The volcanoes are there though for the same reason that there are volcanoes all over Indonesia, you're sitting right on top of a subduction zone where the Juan de Fuca plate dives under the North American plate.

The biggest wildcard right now might be the fact that the Juan de Fuca and North American are locked up tighter than a deadbolt, and probably have been for about the last 300 years or so.

reformer,

Jeff Frey is right that earthquake hazards must also be considered. He hints at, though does not detail, another danger of that possibility; a massive tsunami onto the Seattle waterfront. You have the distinct chance of an offshore/under-sound earthquake generated a wave that could sweep right up into the city. Not something that's easy or even really possible to prepare for, but it's there.

Jeff Frey,

Regarding grandfathering, you're right that you run the risk of destroying property value. Here's my proposal. The grandfathering stays in effect as long as the original use of the property remains the same and the building(s) are fundamentally intact. So if a single-family home is sold to another single family, the grandfathering stays in effect. If that home is sold to a developer who razes it to build a larger home, the new laws kick in. A gas station or a motel can keep changing owners and keeping its old status, but if someone wants to build something new there, they're now adding new development and the new rules apply. An imperfect solution, but one that helps keep the properties viable while still nudging use patterns in the right direction.

And even if the entire grandfathering proposal is untenable, I strongly advocate the government policy that no tax money finance rebuilding in areas of localized risk, post-disaster. That alone would shift use patterns, if people knew they were truly on their own.

zaiquiri,

First, volcanoes don't always give lots of warning. Second, those warnings are generally very cryptic and difficult to interpret in a way useful to public policy. Consider Mt St Helens. Everyone felt sure it was ready to erupt, but no one knew when or how. As it turned out, we narrowly missed a greater loss of life because the government was about to allow lots of people back into the area to recover property threatened by the volcano. If Rainier starts giving "lots of warning", at what point and based on what evidence do you evacuate the exurbs of Seattle? At what point do you make the incredibly expensive and disruptive decisions that are required to save human life, while never being sure you're right until it's too late? Keep in mind that in hazard management, a single false alarm can be more damaging in the long run than almost any disaster. Evacuate greater Seattle, Rainier doesn't blow, and you'll never convince people again. So I wouldn't be so blase about volcanoes if I were you. Expecting one to erupt, and knowing when and how it will erupt, are two extremely different situations. Geologists may be happy with the former, but public policy needs the latter.

Literatehobo, you make some excellent points there.  Food for thought.

As you seem to point out, St Helens is a case where the "wisdom" of hindsight is almost certainly false.  Easy to pooh-pooh the people who were itching to return, now that we know what ultimately happened and when.  But imagining myself being shut out from home and livelihood, with no definite answer whether or when I might be able to return... not so easy.

As a society, we need some way to provide for those people, have something solid for them to fall back on in a case where it's most prudent to evacuate.  Insurance in the traditional sense doesn't seem to cut it, since that only pays out if the disaster actually strikes and you suffer a loss.

But it can't be Carte Blanche either, otherwise you'll just make it easier for people to decide to live in areas where they ought not.

I have this crazy idea for something like "evacuation insurance".  You could buy this insurance for yourself, at some rate set by the estimated overall risk where you live...  and then you might have some scheme where the govornment matches your contribution, a la a 401K program.

If then, there's a mandatory evacuation order where you live, this insurance would pay out in proportion to the amount of time that you have to be away from home and livelihood (but to encourage you to do the right thing, it would only pay out if you actually evacuated....).

Possibly dumb, however, I do like the idea of giving people incentive to do the responsible thing, while still preserving the rights of the Harry Truman's of the world to make the "if it goes down, I wanna go down with it" decision.

zaiquiri,

It's an interesting idea, thoughI suspect implementing it would be a bear (like most good policy ideas).

I agree that I would like to preserve people's rights to make their own decisions. What bothers me in our society is that such a right tends to come with the assumption that it has no consequences, or that the consquences will be taken care of by a benevolent government. As I said earlier, hardship converts libertarians into socialists at an impressive rate.

Years ago, I read that the National Park Service and associated land-management agencies were considing implementing policies in which backcountry users would have to repay part or all of the rescue cost in the event of an accident. This was specifically aimed at extreme-sport types who felt they had a right to go wherever they wanted, then blew half the park's discretionary budget on a technical rescue when something went wrong. Having worked at several national parks, I'm all for that type of thing. You want to heliski? Fine. We're installing a card swipe at the door of the rescue helicopter, or at the very least at the permit desk before you're allowed to go out. Risk and freedom ought to go hand in hand with cost and responsibility, but that's something no politician has managed to grasp or convey.