Archived Press Releases
Izmit: a disaster waiting to happen in many Third World cities
Released: 1999
In developing countries, nine out of 10 earthquake-threatened cities are no better prepared to survive a major earthquake than Izmit, Turkey.
That is the conclusion of a just-completed survey of earthquake experts in 20 cities around the world commissioned by the United Nations and conducted by GeoHazards International (GHI), a Palo Alto-based nonprofit organization established to reduce death and suffering caused by earthquakes in the world's most vulnerable communities.
The 7.4 magnitude quake that struck western Turkey on Aug. 17 killed at least 12,000 people and left 200,000 homeless.
"When a passenger airliner crashes, at the same time that people are tending to victims, others are inspecting the remainder of the fleet," says GHI President Brian E. Tucker. "Sometimes the fleet is grounded until the causes of the disaster are identified and remedied. Here the 'fleet' is the world's large cities built near faults capable of generating large earthquakes. We should inspect these cities for the conditions that existed at Izmit and fix the problems, the easiest and deadliest first."
According to Tucker, the results of the GHI survey are consistent with other recent assessments of urban earthquake risk in developing countries. The results also imply that comparable disasters will certainly occur in other cities around the world unless preventative action is taken. Furthermore, the studies make it clear that shortsightedness and lack of information, rather than cost, are the major barriers to improved seismic safety, Tucker adds.
"Few people realize how affordable earthquake safety measures are," says Amod Dixit, executive director of the National Society of Earthquake Technology - Nepal (NSET), which has been working with GHI since 1993 on improving Kathmandu's earthquake safety. "Our work has shown that building safe structures in Nepal increases construction costs by less than 3 percent in most cases, and significant increases in safety can be achieved at virtually no additional cost."
Haresh Shah, professor emeritus of Stanford's Civil Engineering Department and a member of the Board of Trustees of GHI, uses the case of Nepal, which is implementing an earthquake risk-management action plan and is poised to adopt its first-ever seismic building code, as an illustration that the devastating losses experienced in the Turkish earthquake are not necessary.
"If existing methods of emergency response planning, urban planning, retrofitting of existing structures and construction of new buildings are aggressively applied, the magnitude of the impending tragedy could be greatly reduced," Shah says. "Thousands of deaths can be avoided."
The GHI survey - undertaken as part of a United Nations seismic safety project - interviewed specialists in eight Asian, six South American, four European and two African cities about their city's earthquake risk and risk management practices. It found that three-quarters of the cities have building codes, but less than half enforce their code. Further, only half of the 20 cities had even a minimal emergency response capability, while even fewer had both an emergency response plan and regular drills or actual experience using the plan. Only one city in 10 reported a good, well-enforced building code and a good, well-rehearsed emergency response plan.
According to Tucker, cities in developing countries are at particular risk of earthquakes, and that risk is increasing. In this century, four out of every five deaths caused by earthquakes occurred in developing countries. Of the people living in earthquake-threatened cities in 1950, two out of every three were in developing countries. In the year 2000, nine out of every 10 will be in developing countries.
The 1988 Armenian earthquake and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in Northern California were nearly equivalent in their magnitudes and in the number of people in the affected regions, but the results were far different - 63 people died in California while at least 25,000 died in Armenia.
Three years ago, GHI organized a NATO Workshop in Almaty, Kazakhstan. At that time the experts who attended the meeting determined that half of the six million people living in the capital cities of the five Central Asian Republics occupied buildings that were extremely vulnerable to collapse during earthquakes. They estimated that a repeat of large historical earthquakes could produce human death tolls ranging from 30,000 to 135,000 per event and seriously injure between 120,000 to 540,000 people.
Last year, a collaborative study between GHI and Nepalese earthquake experts concluded that the next major earthquake near Kathmandu could kill 40,000 people, seriously injure 100,000 and leave even more homeless.
GHI's Carlos Villacis, working with leading Latin American earthquake experts, has come up with similar estimates for Tijuana, Mexico, Antofagasta, Chile and Guayaquil, Ecuador as a result of the UN project. In the event of a large quake, they have calculated that Tijuana could suffer 18,000 deaths and 37,000 serious injuries; Antofagasta could sustain 3,000 deaths and 7,000 serious injuries; and Guayaquil could have 26,000 deaths and 53,000 serious injuries.
"It is important to realize that even the most well-drilled emergency response team, using the best emergency response plan, would have been overwhelmed with the situation - some 40,000 buried souls ! - that faced the authorities in Turkey," said Shirley Mattingly, a GHI collaborator and former regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "There is no single 'silver bullet' in the earthquake preparedness business. Threatened communities must have good and well-enforced building codes, land use plans, and emergency response plans, as well as informed leaders and an aware public that is intolerant of corruption."
by David F. Salisbury
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