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Comment by yellow_lead | Hacker News Reader

This was felt pretty strongly in Taipei, some reports of electricity outage too. All my friends and I seem ok though.

I’m also in Taipei. It’s the worst one ever I’ve felt in my life. Staying on the 7th floor with noway to escape in time is probably the worst feeling

If it's any consolation, there's not really time to escape a collapsing building from any level, since the bottom floors usually are crushed first and near instantaneously. If you look at pictures from partially collapsed buildings in Hualian you can see that sometimes it's just the bottom floor that's destroyed and the remaining floors are fine for sometimes days or even until the building is manually taken down.

The pictures of collapsed buildings after earthquakes are scary but the chance of an individual building collapsing are quite low, you're at far greater risk if you're outside near buildings because broken glass or similar could fall on you.

The standard advice is good advice for a reason: stay inside, under sturdy furniture, on your elbows and knees, covering your head. You can learn more here: https://sf-fire.org/disaster-preparedness-information-resour...

I appreciate the context you're providing, but "Hey you'd be dead regardless of where you are in the building at the time if it collapses" isn't as reassuring as you'd think.

Read his comment again

Any data on survivability of occupants of upper floors in cases where the bottom floor is destroyed and the rest of the building settles on top of the rubble instead of pancaking? This is exactly what happened with some apartment blocks in Japan earlier this year, too.

I guess it depends a lot on whether the building stays upright or falls over, as there are plenty of objects that can crush a person in any space that suddenly turns sideways.

Which is why the advice has always been to hide under something sturdy, like a table or bed. For the most part, it should break the impact of anything on top falling onto it.

Yes, the usual advice is optimized for buildings that stay upright. But this [1] happens, too, surprisingly often with reinforced concrete buildings. A table turned sideways isn't going to stop the fridge that's hurtling toward you.

Ships roll all the time in heavy seas but don't have the problem of loose fridges, because everything is anchored much more strongly than on land. Perhaps that's the kind of standard we should aim for, at least for concrete buildings in earthquake zones with a certain width to height ratio.

[1] First photo in https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/01/02/japan/noto-peni...

Table or bed? What they teach here locally is to get under a door frame or a pillar. I guess that recommendation has something to do with construction codes. When your walls are made out of light wood a sturdy table might protect you from fractured pieces I guess.

If I remember from Introduction to Natural Disasters in college, the door frame example is mainly for masonry buildings, and is a bit of a historical artifact.

My understanding is that advice today strongly suggests getting under something sturdy in the attempt to end up in a void during a collapse event.

> My understanding is that advice today strongly suggests getting under something sturdy in the attempt to end up in a void during a collapse event.

A table is sturdy?

The doorframes here are made out of solid steel. It's literally the most sturdy place to be next to pillar. On top of that if the solid steel door gets stuck you will not leave the apartment until emergency services with steel drills or someone with welding equipment frees you from there. I'm a bit puzzled at what you were taught there.

Contrary to the US, Taiwan has had proper earthquake compliant building codes that for the most part have been enforced(and reinforced) since the last disaster stuck the island over 20 years ago. For most places in the world outside of Japan, Taiwan, and a few other places an earthquake of this magnitude would be a mass casualty event.

One is that in an open floor plan, you may not have time to find the nearest actual doorway.

I would also imagine that the strength of any given doorway would depend on if the wall it was in is load bearing. A non load bearing wall is going to get crushed to bits once an actual load falls on it.

I do think the advice is geared towards traditional furniture and not today’s IKEA particleboard crap.

As a Taiwanese, I got used to it.

Are earthquakes in Taiwan as frequent as in Japan?

The recommendation that I was taught when I took Chinese lessons btw is to stand either below a pillar or a door frame, and to open the doors so that once the initial shaking is over you can escape(for example the door frame might get stuck and then you cannot even escape in case of an emergency).

Most of the collapsed buildings however seem to have not collapsed directly, but rather the foundation seems to have given in, so that if you were above the second floor you would probably have been able to be rescued.

What I found most terrifying is that there are construction sites where material has flown to neighbouring buildings and destroyed parts of them. Imagine your building being up to code and then killing just because your apartment happened to be facing a highrise construction site.

I have a feeling that the injury and death toll will probably take a while to be assessed. This felt genuinely terrifying.

It's quite impressive that this red building Hualien County is just leaning and didn't collapse. Even most of the glass panes are still in place and mirror the ground just fine. Comparing this to earthquakes in places like Turkey when the buildings just collapse into a pile of rubble, I doubt the builders in Hualien could have done much better expect for foundation piles going far deeper than code dictates.

Yeah I agree. A friend of mine in Hongkong told me that his windows (in a new construction) would fall out during smaller seismic events. What I meant though were things outside of the control of the building construction.

In 1999 Taiwan had a major earthquake where some 2400 people died. 3 months after the disaster the government released a change in building construction codes, to some extent, what you see here is the result of those policies being enforced right away. It's quite a feat of engineering, but I don't know to what extent this extends to sewage, gas, and/or other piping systems not directly related to the building construction.

> and to open the doors so that once the initial shaking is over you can escape

Just to make sure to stand far away from the doors you leave open as they can swing and hit you.

Is there a stream of the big dampening device in Taipei 101? I cannot find it via usual searches but wonder if it is available in another language search.

It happened too early 8:03 AM. Probably no visitor or even staff in Taipei 101. Last time videos are all from visitor.

That’s too bad. They should live stream it so they can allow performance after earthquakes, a testament to successful engineering.

I can't imagine how terrifying it will be if I was on Taipei 101 during this quake...

There's no building I'd rather be in during an earthquake in all of Taiwan.

Scratch that - a TSMC fabrication facility is probably safer.

You shouldn't be.

Tall buildings (> 40 floors) are one of the safer places to be in an earthquake.

1) They're engineered.

2) They're already designed for side loads from wind.

3) Their fundamental frequency is well lower than the peak of the earthquake spectrum, so they don't amplify the motion. Good rule of thumb is that period = floors/10, so fo a 50 story building you're looking at a 5 second period. Earthquakes have most of their energy in ~1 second period waves. So effectively, the base wiggles and the top just floats along.

The place to be terrified is in a 6-10 story unreinforced masonry apartment building.

> 1) They're engineered.

Famous last words.

They're more engineered than a 6 story apartment building.

(civil engineer by training, though never got a PE because startups)

I'm in Taichung, it shook hard as hell but I don't think we took any damage comparing to Taipei or Hualien.

I'm also living in central Taipei, this one woke me up, we felt really strong shaking in our flat on the 4th floor. Some tiles fell off the buildings on my street but otherwise everyone is fine.

Right after the quake saw police and fire dept patrolling around.

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