Blogs

Jason Overdorf from GlobalPost recently wrote that a catastrophic earthquake in Nepal could unleash devastation surpassing that of Haiti or Chile.

KATHMANDU, Nepal — When disaster specialist Amod Dixit looks out his window in Kathmandu, he sees collapsed bridges, demolished hospitals, schools reduced to rubble and dusty corpses lying in the street, the nightmare of Port-au-Prince revisited on his Himalayan home.

Michael Reilly at Discovery News posted an interesting article titled "How the Chile Earthquake Went Nuclear".  He writes:

If you want to grow a truly massive earthquake, you've got to give it space.

To many around the world, it seems that the number of destructive earthquakes has increased dramatically.  Yet most of the destruction is due to the recent exponential increases in human populations along major fault zones. 

Saturday, February 28, 2010: Still reeling from the devastating effects of the magnitude 7.0 Haiti earthquake of January 12, 2010, the world today is witnessing immense destruction and life loss in the aftermath of a magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile – an event hundreds of times larger than Haiti, which could turn out to be one of the most powerful earthquakes in history. In just a few tens of seconds, the Nazca tectonic plate “slid” beneath South American plate. Populations at risk

"Myths are stories told by people about people: where they come from, how they handle major disasters, how they cope with what they must and how everything will end.” – Robert O’Connell 

News and images of the January 12th Haiti earthquake and its aftershocks are unspeakably horrendous. As we join millions of others around the world in support of coordinated relief efforts, we also want to help spread the word on how to help.

Click on the following links to make donations online, or to learn more about how to participate in other ways.

Open Hazards Group forecast a probability of less than 1% that an earthquake the size of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake would occur within a 100 km radius of the actual location. Why?

I plugged in my old address in Altadena, California to this site’s damage estimator, and placed a magnitude 7.5 earthquake (a plausible event) on the San Andreas fault. I placed the epicenter near Palmdale, California. The result I got was unsettling, and frankly made me glad I now live in an area where I only have to worry about ice storms, blizzards, tornadoes and mosquitoes. Here’s what I got:

You’re walking across a street when you notice a car speeding toward you. Will it hit you?

Think. Where are you in relation to the speeding car? Does the driver see you? Will you make it across the street to safety by continuing at your walking pace? Or, should you break into a run?

You realize the driver doesn’t seem to notice you, and the car isn’t slowing down. You also realize that, unless you run you’ll be run over. You immediately break into a run, and reach the sidewalk just as the car speeds by you.