Last week, a massive 7.2 earthquake rocked Southern Turkey and northern Syria in a catastrophe that has reached a death toll in the thousands and counting. Entire villages and buildings crumbled in a matter of only a couple of minutes, and many are wondering what is there to expect if something similar were to happen in California.
It’s common knowledge for Angelenos and Californians that the state has not just one, but multiple means fault lines that ride through the state. At any moment, any one of them could shift, causing an earthquake in analogous to the one recently seen in Turkey.
Professor John Vidale is a seismologist at the University of Southern California. He says that the last time something akin to a large quake happened in California, was over 100 years ago, and managed to break an 8.0 magnitude on the Richter scale.
JOHN VIDALE: “So, you know, the true story here was a big earthquake that ran right through a lot of towns. And I guess the secondary factor is, you know, the buildings were not adequate. And it’s hard to make buildings that can stand up to that kind of earthquake.”
But that is not to say that all hope is lost. Vidale claims that the reasoning that the fatalities in Turkey are so high can be due to the lack or resources the country has to restructure its buildings. Something California has steadily prepared itself for.
VIDALE: “But in Turkey, you know, they don’t have the resources to identify the buildings with prayer rooms and to fix them. So that was probably a factor of the old buildings. And then, you know, third factor is whenever you have 10,000 buildings shaking, a few of them are going to be made wrong. So, you know, either through sloppiness or cost cutting. Some of those buildings are probably deficient.”
The process began after the Northridge earthquake in 1994 when a number of older buildings completed with old masonry tactics tended to be the ones with the most damage.
There is really no way to be truly prepared, but the matter is depending upon building a city from the ground up, which to many just seems unrealistic.
VIDALE: “But, you know, the real challenges, the problems are hard to predict. So we don’t really know how prepared we are. We know there are a lot of things we should do, but many are tremendously expensive.”
For Annenberg Media, I’m Spencer Cline