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Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

I feel like we're woefully underprepared for earthquakes. It feels like pushing away technical debt on a societal scale.

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There are so many building regulations, and grants to help older buildings meet standards that were not in place when they were built, awareness and education campaigns, and built-in procedures and policies in place that a regular California resident doesn't need to let the fear of an earthquake take over their life.

California is as prepared as any state can be for an earthquake and it is constantly looking for better ways to be prepared.

Well, not really. Compared to Japan...

Because Japan has way more earthquakes. Relatively, we are pretty well prepared in references to buildings. Now food supplies and power? I feel like people aren’t mentally prepared for that.

There's lots of regulations, but the regulations seem flawed by design. For example, in California at least, buildings need to be built to survive earthquakes, but not necessarily be functional.

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-earthquake-legi...

In the event of a larger quake, you might survive the initial shock but a high percentage of your city, including new buildings will need to be torn down.

This represents a huge loss to a city in economic terms. Imagine if downtown LA lost 50% of its office buildings and apartment buildings. Compare this to Japan where buildings survive and are required to be usable. Japanese engineers are shocked at what they consider to be American substandard building codes.

The US govt has even concluded that better and stiffer building codes would save billions a year: https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.nibs.org/resource/resmgr/docs/MS_C...

Also a really relevant article with great info-graphics.

"Buildings Can Be Designed to Withstand Earthquakes. Why Doesn’t the U.S. Build More of Them?"

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/03/us/earthquake...

I think the lack of damage from this shows a high degree of preparation. This same earthquake 50 years ago would have likely been much worse.

I was in Los Gatos for the epicenter of the 89 quake that was 6.7 I believe. It was pretty bad. It looks like this was handled much better.

6.7 is a lot stronger than a 6.4 though, as well.

If we are splitting hair, a 6.4 can technically be more dangerous compared to a 6.7 if the waves and the oscillation of the building coincide and amplify.

The Richter Scale is 10 x per full point. A 6.7 should be 4 times the strength of a 6.4

I was living in east bay during that time and just returned home from school. When the earthquake hit I could see the road create waves like a flipped rug. Fortunately no damage to our house.

Mind if I ask what part of Los Gatos you were in? I was near the corner of West Main and Bayview, a few blocks from downtown.

We didn't have much damage, but walking through the neighborhood afterward I counted about 20 houses that slid off their foundations.

This was also relatively remote. If it had been, say, the East Bay, where there’s high population density and lots of older homes with unreinforced masonry foundations, the situation would look a lot different.

Nah, there's just not a whole lot in that part of the world.

When I lived in that general area, there was a 7.1 or 7.2 and I think there was one death. IIRC, it was due to a heart attack and locals joked it was in reaction to the amount of liquor bottles broken in some liquor store because photos of the broken bottles got splashed all over the papers as one of the bigger points of damage.

A train was derailed in that quake and I think someone broke their arm but no one died because it was going unusually slow for a passenger train, having been scheduled behind a slow-moving freight train.

We had aftershocks for weeks that interfered with my sleep. Some of the aftershocks were above a 5.0.

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